What motivates young Germans who will be able to vote for the first time this year? Do they even vote? What expectations, plans and goals do you have for your life and what does politics have to do with them? The ninety-minute documentary “18+ Germany” by Lukas Ratius and Philipp Majer tries to approach these questions and the answers by observing them. He follows five protagonists, three young men and two young women, from spring 2020 to summer 2021, showing their everyday life, families, friends and living conditions and repeatedly interspersing scenes in which they talk about dreams and fears, about the future. And about their relationship to Germany, the state, and Germany, home.
The self-confident Doha from Berlin is irritating if you take the cliché of the patriarchally oppressed Muslim woman one-to-one. “18+” accompanies them in their wedding preparations, in barbecues with their extended family and in furnishing the young couple's first own apartment. And in the feminist women's boxing club, in which she, more veiled than her students, works as a trainer. For Doha boxing is a way of life, as important as traditions, the modern appropriation of which she deals eloquently in front of the camera.
Just like Doha, Erik knows what he wants from Essen. Move to the Uckermark, work, house, wife, children, although you just can't force that with women. He has little good things to say about his experiences during school, especially with classmates from large migrant families. Erik deals with old-age poverty and the pension gap. The biker scene taught him values, maybe he wants to sign up for the armed forces, including for foreign assignments. Yannick from near Freiburg raps about his life, his city, about racism and experiences of discrimination. He dreams of a career as a musician, makes videos, wants to build a house with his girlfriend in Togo, his mother's homeland, but wants to stay in Germany permanently.
Laura lives in Rott am Inn and is a real country child, as she says. A young woman who cuts trees and drives cows to the alpine pastures. For her, her parents' marriage is a role model, she already has the dream job of a farmer, a planned year stay in Canada was canceled due to Corona, not so bad. Jakob, who grew up in Zwickau, is doing his Abitur at the beginning of the film, moves into a shared apartment in Halle to study politics and sociology. Even as a teenager he was active against the law, later for the Green Youth, for Fridays for Future and most recently for Black Lives Matter. For him, political engagement is the most important task in life, at least at the moment. The five of them already know pretty well where their journey should go. Everyone understands that their idea of self-realization also depends on the framework conditions,which this state will give them.
Particularly in the documentary montage and the cinematic stylistic devices, “18+” is reminiscent of the award-winning 3sat series “Ab 18+”. While in the shorter portraits at 3sat the protagonists themselves occasionally lead the camera and the access is often more artistic, Ratius and Majer condense the portrayals of life in their documentation through sober, gradual observation, through parallel running of the stories and their skilful contrasting into a kind of Germany Picture sheet.
Her strength is the balance between the narration in pictures and longer shots (landscape shots, everyday surroundings, activities) and the shorter interview passages, in which you only hear Doha, Erik, Yannick, Jakob and Laura themselves speaking. Her explanations begin as a voice-over to scenes that show the reality of life before the camera shows her face to face in front of a neutral background, as if to invite the audience to a discourse (camera and editing by Philipp Majer).
There is no speaker comment and no statistical or informational classification.
The information offered by the “18+” is nevertheless varied and thorough.
“Big” (societal) political issues such as racism, justice, feminism and integration are developed from personal proximity.
In the concreteness of the film, this seems more vital than talking about it in television discussions.
The selection of the main characters appears representative, almost ideally supporting the state.
The film abstains from party-political classifications, and one thing has in common: Germany as a home country can win a lot from these five.
18+ Germany
, at 10:50 p.m. on Das Erste