Heavy Girls

Yes, you can make a film on less than 600 euros, and it can be great. Axel Ranisch, a student of Rosa von Praunheim, shows how it’s done with Dicke Mädchen (Heavy Girls). He puts his grandmother in front of the camera, shoots in her apartment, improvises, shoots quickly, and doesn’t bother with professionally lit sets or film funding applications. The result is raw and touching and is the starting signal for a whole movement of German filmmakers who stick to their own manifestos, sometimes more, sometimes less. “German Mumblecore,” an inappropriate description of the wave, was born in 2012 with the film Heavy Girls. An apartment complex in Berlin: Edeltraut is old and has dementia. Her son Sven takes care of her. When Sven has to work, Daniel, a caregiver, comes by. Sven and Daniel are in their 40s, overweight and very cautiously fall in love with each other. That’s all you really need to know, because the rest of the film is a mixture of love, charm and courage. Courage to just go for it: mini-DV, great idea, screw the rest. Love for a wonderfully extraordinary ordinary story, for fat men who have never been shown as beautifully and uninhibitedly in German film. Charm of Ranisch’s grandma Ruth Bickelhaupt, who makes her enchanting film debut here at the age of 85 and has since been beautifully featured in numerous German film productions.  

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