GERTI GRASSI, CLEMENS BOBKE IN TOMORROW A LONG TIME AGO
LUISE DONSCHER: TOMORROW A LONG TIME AGO/MORGEN VORLANGER ZEIT (2026) NYFF Currents Section
At reunification, GDR woman loses her job, then her mind
The economic consequences of reunification were severe and disruptive for many East Germans in the 1990s, characterized by mass unemployment, industrial collapse, and profound social upheaval. This is the bad news rumbling under the surface of Luise Donscher's rather surreal short feature film, Tomorrow a Long Time Ago, which harks back to that time. The protagonist Patty (Gerti Drassl) loses her job, later apparently her boyfriend, and finally quite possibly her mind.
Early on there is a discussion that brings up the the Battle of Frankenhausen (fought on May 15, 1525), where the uprising of local peasants led by the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer was crushed in a bloody massacre when the peasants fled into a hollow they can't get out of, a place later referred to as the "gutter of blood." Is this meant to suggest that the East Germans were trapped at reunification? The opening panorama suggests that the spaces are still there.
From an Italian Locarno review (Matthew Galli in Close-Up) I learn that many were let go from their jobs upon reunification, and this was often called "Abwicklung," severance pay. This happens to Patty, who works at a local state-run "film factory." This signals that the East German film industry also took a dive. We learn money was exchanged at a rate of 2:1, and Patty's piggy bank, smashed, yields little. There's a dramatic scene in Wolfgang Becker's 2003 film Good Bye Lenin! where the siblings arrive too late to exchange their mother's ample savings, and all the banknotes turn into junk.
Patty appears middle aged, with severe features, sometimes tending toward the sad. She is also losing her friends, because many fled toward the better life and the dominance of the West. Patty does not appear to have a traditional boyfriend; instead, the film focuses on her relationship with her close friend/companion Jelena (Manuela Biedermann) and her later encounters and hangouts with a younger man named Franz (Clemens Bobke).
We see children in a classroom. We also see Patty with Franz in a scene of sensual longing. Later Patty loses Jelena, and apparently starts accumulating so many possessions she can't get into her apartment (but what is she doing lying on the sofa spread out on the lawn?). We now see Patty head out to "the fantastical forests of the Kyffhäuser woods" (as the blurb says) with camping gear and a sleeping bag, running a fire cooking potatoes, standing in the middle of a field and fleeing only when it's invaded by a herd of sheep. Earlier scenes with young men are full of sunshine, as is the trip to the racetrack. But when Patty goes camping, there is snow.
What goes wrong with Patty? Things seem to take a turn for the worse when she and Franz go to the historic Galopprennbahn Scheibenholz race track near Leipzig, and she appears to pass him some of her savings to bet with and says "You pay the rent." What becomes of the bet or that request is unclear.
As much as the trajectory of Patty, director Donschen seems to be interested in the search for peace and the menace of crowds, who go from yelling “Freiheit! Freiheit!” (“Freedom! Freedom!”) to a later recording, equally enthusiastic and massive, of "Ausländer raus" ("foreigners out”). The film has focused initially on a fresco by resco by Werner Tübke (1929-2004) at the Panorama Museum depicting the Peasants' War that's a little bit like something by Hieronymus Bosch but much more conventional in style. Apparently school children in the GDR were taught a Marxist interpretation of the Peasants' War. And we see school children being taught about peasant salaries of so many pfennigs to do maths.
Galli reports that Jelena, Patty's female friend, is seen at earlier and later stages, played by different actresses, and appears to have returned to East Germany after all, but I can't vouch for this. Galli and I can agree on his statement that the plot of this film "appears rather cryptic." The film has moments. About thirty minutes in, it seems to Have found a plot. But when Patty loses her hold on stable existence she loses me. That there are many shots of darkness, almost no music, that Patty hardly says anything and is only seen eating a potato, don't contribute to the narrative for me. Yet a filmmaker born in the GDR who deals with the reunification of Germany may yet have something important to say. Galli refers to Angela Schanelec - a rather hardcore avant-gardist. She isn't there. The derangement here may belong to what has become to the real world.
Tomorrow a Long Time Ago/Morgen Vorlanger ZEit, 93 minutes, premiered at Locarno Aug. 14, 2026, showing also Iin the Currents section of the NYFF, as part of which it wws screened for this report.