Fahr zur Hölle, Schwester!

Claire was always her mother’s favourite. After a gruesome accident with a spindryer, in which she loses a foot and can never dance again, her elder sister Rita is shut out even more. At the age of eighteen, Claire flees the suffocating parental love and emigrates to Israel. Rita is left behind to look after their mother. The childhood images, almost devoid of colour, then make way for images in which Claire, now about forty, hears about a revolutionary repair operation from her boyfriend (played by fashion designer Wolfgang Joop). She travels back to Germany to fetch her mother’s savings book, once opened for this very purpose. The unexpected reunion after so many years evokes feelings of suppressed jealousy and vengeance in the eccentric Rita. Then the film unfolds as a thriller in which Rita holds her wheelchairbound sister hostage in the huge, halfempty house.This drama, originally intended as a TV film, can be regarded as a play in which almost all events take place within the same space. The two sisters are convincingly played by the German TV divas Iris Berben and Hannelore Elsner (who also played the impressive leading role in Röhler’s Die Unberührbare). The dance scenes, in which Rita is briefly a child again, are both moving and bizarre.