Zacharias Zitouni

A person enters the frame dressed up as a bird. In a dressing room, John Malkovich sheds the costume of Casanova. A young woman's skirt is just as orange as the beak of a zebra finch singing in a cage. White lilies stand at the foot of a statue of the Virgin Mary, red roses in front of the window of an SM studio. There the quiet game of submission in exchange for money, in a museum an embrace, a poem whispered in the ear. Children playing in a forest in autumn. A forest in summer, framed by light. An orgasm and a dance.

»It’s just gone?«, Zacharias asks. »Just all gone«, his Algerian-born father, Mustapha, replies. But the family doesn’t forget the traumatizing events burned into the memory of his German mother, Christiane: her husband’s arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Algeria in the 1990s.

»It’s just gone?«, Zacharias asks. »Just all gone«, his Algerian-born father, Mustapha, replies. But the family doesn’t forget the traumatizing events burned into the memory of his German mother, Christiane: her husband’s arrest, imprisonment, and deportation to Algeria in the 1990s.