Finally Tacheles: Documentary about a Jewish game designer who wants to release a game about the Holocaust, but reveals painful family secrets in the process.
Plot and background
Yaar is 21 years old, Jewish, lives in Berlin and pursues the dream of earning a living as a game designer. Judaism is associated with pain for him; according to him, his father Ilei still suffers from the Holocaust, although he never experienced it himself. The computer game “Shoah. When God Slept” is initially born out of rebellion, but aims to revisit the question of victims and perpetrators. It is to be set in 1940 and offer the option that Jews can defend themselves and that the Nazis act humanely. His father is initially appalled by the project.
He finds support in his friends Sarah and Marcel. Yaar’s grandma Rina is the role model for the Jew in the play. The SS officer is supposed to be inspired by an ancestor of Marvel. As the 21st century generation tries to break free of the role attributions of perpetrators and victims, they stumble upon a terrible family secret while researching Rina’s birthplace, Krakow.
The trailer raises the question of what influence the Holocaust still leaves on young generations today:
Yaar and his friends have to realise how closely the past is still connected to their lives. What follows is a painful confrontation with their own history and a new relationship between father and son. “Finally Tacheles” began as a project against forgetting. The contemporary witnesses of the Shoah are dying, textbooks are not enough to make the pain of yesteryear comprehensible.
“Finally Tacheles” – background, cinema release
In the course of filming, the young man has to find out how he can come to terms with the traumas of previous generations in order to still go his own way. The German cinema release of “Endlich Tacheles” is on 14 October 2021. The documentary by Andrea Schramm and Jana Matthes has been nominated for the German Film Award in the category as Best Documentary 2021.
