Three Ways of Returning

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

Three filmmakers in England – where none of them was born. Xiaolu Guo travels to the small seaside town in China where she grew up with her grandparents, only to find streets renamed and parts of the town rebuilt. The old times weren’t too good, the new ones are barely better, but a lot is different. Andrea Luka Zimmerman revisits their personal archive, in particular diaries from their teenage years, that detail the monstrous abuse they faced at the hands of their mother, making them flee the German south for a very different life in the UK. Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari realises a cinematic conversation piece set almost completely inside an apartment that feels eerily outside of place and time. Even if the big and small screens provide concrete information galore, it’s not sure where she and her relatives are – at least in their heads, a condition of being forcibly uprooted.

Three Ways of Returning is a triptych of many layers and emotions, ranging from rage to melancholia, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected, sometimes bemusing and sometimes devastating ways.

– Olaf Möller

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