Dominik Graf is considered an exceptional director. With the renowned screenwriter Beate Langmaack, he presents a story about workaholism and loss of humanity in the TV film “Mein Falke”.
Dominik Graf’s new film focuses on a bird of prey. “There’s something aristocratic about a falcon like that. Even if he comes across as a baby, he still seems like a refinement factor,” the reserved count told the German Press Agency in Hamburg. “For the person who walks through the landscape with a falcon walks upright in a beautiful posture.”
The film by the ten-time Grimme Prize winner will be shown on Das Erste this Wednesday (8:15 p.m.). Arte showed it in November.
On the set near Wolfsburg, where a falconer was always present, there were even three specimens of these hunting birds. One for reserve – and two that ended up in the care of the main actress, Ratte-Polle. Or rather in that of her role character – a woman who is completely focused on her job as a forensic biologist at a forensic medicine institute and is therefore isolated from those around her.
Feelings of connection
Thanks to her encounter with the animal she is supposed to tame, Inga experiences feelings of connection again for the first time. At the same time, she is disturbed by statements made by her gnarly widowed father (Jörg Gudzuhn), who blames her for her divorce. And also claims that the neighbor’s daughter Charlotte (Olga von Luckwald) is her half-sister.
Inga hesitantly finds the way to herself – and to more humanity. There always seems to be a kind of invisible “memento mori” (remember that you have to die) in the drama, which has quite cheerful undertones. After all, Inga is confronted with the remains of human bodies every day in her work. Yet she fails to truly live her own life.
The story, told in poetically simple everyday images, was written by Beate Langmaack, who has also won the Grimme Prize several times. Graf already worked with her on the leukemia drama “Hanne” (2019) with Iris Berben.
The interpersonal
He has a lot of understanding for his film heroine, says Graf. “I think she’s a character who comes to terms with the fact that she hasn’t come far in her life in terms of interpersonal relationships. And she believes she can compensate for that in her work. She’s very clever.” And he continues: “It’s only in the moment when she is thrown onto her human side that you realize how weak she is when she should actually be human. She is a person who lives in an imbalance and that is not the case really white.”
Such an attitude is probably not untypical today, says Graf – and it doesn’t exclude his own industry. “My job in particular, which involves the whole world, fills you up completely. This allows you to compensate for the other side – the life you live – so to speak. But at some point you should notice it.”
The busy actress Ratte-Polle can also identify with her character Inga. The 49-year-old, who works on major stages, for film, television and radio, even consciously decided not to have children in order to be able to work intensively in her dream job. However, she does care about interpersonal relationships, she tells the dpa.
Regarding her Inga, Ratte-Polle explains: “I want to tell female characters from new perspectives. That’s what I’m looking for. And here I thought it was great to tell that a woman lives alone – but the problem isn’t that she doesn’t have a partner relationship. But that she generally closes herself off from people.” After all, you can live very well alone without being lonely. “I think that aspect is important,” emphasizes the actress.
Rat Polle: “These birds are so subtle.”
“The bird widens her gaze,” says the artist. In order to prepare for her role, she learned to put a hunting animal in her hand at a falconry farm in Potsdam and go for a walk with it. “It has something very contemplative,” says Ratte-Polle. “These birds are so sensitive, they notice everything. As soon as you are nervous, they become restless, flutter and want to fly away.”
Your director has another memory of the Falcons. “The team had to keep calm. If they said, watch out, the bird is coming, he couldn’t be distracted, otherwise he would have become nervous,” reports Graf. “That triggered an almost whispering level of concentration, which was positive for the entire work. Finally, no one was chatting.”