Bones On Holiday

„Bones On Holiday“, Germany 2024, documentary, 85 min, a cinematic portrait of the Berlin artist Verena Herb and the mortician leader Gabi Kohn.

The film has been officially selected for the 58th Hof International Film Festival. The film festival will take place October 22 – 27, 2024.

At the 58th INTERNATIONAL FILM DAYS IN HOF the dates for the film screenings are on:

Thursday, October 24 at 14.45h in Kino 1

Friday, October 25th at 19.45h in Scala 2

Saturday, October 26th at 12:30h at Scala 2

Link to the 58th International Film Festival Hof: https://www.hofer-filmtage.com/de/

Synopsis:

In „Bones on Holiday“, the filmmaker accompanies two women for several years, each of them facing dying for different reasons, and comes to terms with his own losses of friends and unprocessed grief in the meantime. Berlin artist Verena Herb has been fighting cancer for many years. She uses painting to deal with her illness and to process the fear of death, resulting from it. But her heart beats for the sea, women and animals. Accompanied by her friends Pit, Michael and his partner Carsten and true to the adage „if not now, then when?“ Verena sets off to India to the ocean, which could probably be her last journey. Gabi Kohn is a respected mortician in Berlin. The subject of dying is an affair of the heart for her. Not only does she give relatives space for their fears and emotional pain, she has also already accompanied numerous people sensitively on their final journey. The relative certainty of imminent death and hoped-for self-determination, as well as emotional ambivalence of those who have go and those who will be left behind, are the central topics of the film.

Bones On Holiday – Trailer englsh subtitled

Bones On Holidays“ – Directors Note’s

Bones on Holiday“ is an 84-minute no- budget documentary film in which everyone involved has been working almost for free for several years. Similar to my film „Postcard To Daddy“, we have made a virtue out of necessity and produce films from our own resources and with support/donations from friends. Due to this independency and a small team, we managed to capture intimate, caring and important shared moments. This film created itself out of and alongside our lifes, in jobs, in daily routine, in small and large journeys, as well as from the questions about accompaniment and the fear of loss that we all explored. The whole ambivalence of „dying“ and the unpredictability of which story life will write in the end led us to a unique experience. We never really conceived this film, rather it revealed itself to us, piece by piece, like a puzzle over the last 6 years.

Stills:

Contact & World Distribution

MiCa Film Productions
Michael Stock & Natalia Vitovtov

Metzer Str. 18
D-10405 Berlin / Germany

Phone: +49-176-80636508
Phone: +49-176-31421588
michael-stock@gmx.de

n.vitovtov@gmail.com

About the cast:

Verena Herb – Fine Arts

The entire creative production of the artist Verena Herb can be divided into different chronological periods. For example, there is a period in which the bone paintings were created, followed by the production of paintings with landscape-like motifs. Only when a pictorial theme has been extensively treated in terms of the infinite possibilities of composition, color and format and then completed, does the artist turn to new content. As a result of this way of working, pictures are created that can be seen as a coherent series, but each individual picture contains enough expressive power to be able to exist as an independent work outside the series (with the exception of a few pictures within the series, which were executed separately as diptychs or triptychs and are thus inseparably linked to one another).

This may sound like a concept, but Verena Herb is far from conceptual art. In contrast to conceptual works, emotions are of great importance in her art. The artist is often expressive in her choice of colors and the objects in her paintings are surreal. In the smaller paintings, her working method is a direct painterly realization with the intention that the viewer feels addressed just as directly. Just how direct this expression can be can be seen in some of the sketches in which the artist has written her feelings on the pictures during the creative phase. While these small-format pictures are still the result of more gestural painting, the larger pictures are increasingly elaborated. Spontaneously created pictorial elements are only not worked out in more detail if they can contribute to the general expressiveness of the picture. In these cases, the artist increases the tension in the picture through the juxtaposition of dynamic and detailed painting techniques. Other paintings, on the other hand, derive their impact exclusively from their clear composition and the large areas in bright colors.

Verena Herb has developed her own visual language and changes it with each new stage of production. The starting point for a change in style is always an unforeseeable or outstanding event – positive or negative – in the artist’s life. These events determine whether the content of the picture is strongly abstracted or whether the intention is to recognize the forms depicted. Some pictures are as if from a dream world, while other pictures are more concrete in their statement through the unambiguous identification of individual parts of the picture, and in some cases could even have been created directly from a model in nature. In various places, however, the artist also enriches nature with non-representational details such as those from Colorfield Painting or Abstract Expressionism. The combination of still life, landscape, abstract and expressive painting creates an extraordinarily high level of tension and expressiveness in the pictures, which is why most interested viewers are immediately captivated and inspired by the works. Even though the content of many of the paintings is based on the artist’s very private feelings, everyone – from their own experience – has a connection to the primal motifs depicted, such as water, stone, sky, bones and earth.

Because the oil colors are so fresh and clear, in some places even the structure of the canvas can still be seen, the pictures appear extremely airy. The artist plays and experiments with the colors and shapes. There is an overall positive attitude to life, some oil paintings are full of humor, but there are also paintings that take a critical look at art history or in which the humor has turned into gallows humor. To sum up, Verena Herb’s art is so refreshing because the protagonist does not follow a „well-trodden path“, but constantly reinvents her motifs and can therefore be expected to produce good art in the future.

Ulrich R. Treder

Verena Herb – Animal World (selection). As part of the Berlin premiere of BONES ON HOLIDAY, we are planning an exhibition of the artist’s paintings. The pictures can be purchased. According to Verena’s wish, part of the proceeds will go to animal welfare.

Obituary for Gabi Kohn: „I thought we morticians would never die!“

She was once called Yasmina, was gentle and rather shy. She wanted to leave all that far behind her.

Yasmina and Gabi. Yasmina, the well-adjusted, gentle girl, Gabi, the determined, rebellious woman. All her friends agree with Gabi’s description without hesitation. She was energetic, she said what she thought, what she wanted. Her head alone, the long, straight neck, the thick, dark hair, the clear, turned gaze behind the large, round glasses. Then there was her voice, a chest voice in alto that enveloped everyone softly and fully. Her perfect sentence structure, as if you could hear the semicolons, colons and quotation marks. And she never sounded stilted and old-fashioned, but extremely lively. Yasmina on the other hand: insecure, invisible?

Yasmina and Gabi were one and the same person: Yasmina, the girl, Gabi, the woman who had freed herself from unpleasant childhood circumstances. The name was the beginning, the first outward sign of this transformation. Gabi only told her friends about Yasmina in hints. Virginia, the older sister, knew more.

The parents had met in Berlin and had two daughters and a son. Her mother worked as a cook in a daycare center, where her three children also went. The father was a bricklayer, came from Tunisia and had an alcohol problem. When he drank, he became violent. He pushed, shoved and hit the older daughter, her brother and especially her mother. He spared Yasmina. For a long time, the mother lacked the strength to break away from her husband. Until things got so bad that she took the children and fled with them to a women’s shelter. At night, they all lay in their beds, crying, listening to every sound. Except for Yasmina. She slept soundly.

The father pleaded: „Come back home! I’m getting better!

The father did not let up. He begged his wife: Come back home! I’ll do better! I promise! I swear it!

The mother gave in, nothing got better. Sometime in 1978, the father booked a flight to Genoa and the ship passage from Genoa to Tunisia, a vacation trip for five, as he said. His mother agreed. When they all arrived in Tunis, with her father’s family, he said: „You’re not getting out of here!“ Virginia, Yasmina’s sister, remembers this sentence clearly. They were stuck.

Their mother had no idea about anything. Not about the fact that she had no rights as a mother in Tunisia. That, legally, only the men were in charge. So what now? They settled in as best they could. They first lived with the Tunisian family, then moved into a house in Sousse, a port city on the Mediterranean, around 130 kilometers south of Tunis.

Yasmina went to school, learned a little Arabic and a little French. She liked being with the women, her grandmother, aunts and cousins. But as soon as men appeared, the cheerful atmosphere disappeared.

Would they have to stay here forever?

In one respect, however, the situation improved: the father hardly drank any more and was much less violent. But the shock was still deep-seated. Six months passed. Would they have to stay here forever? It looked like it. Her father suggested to her mother that they should fly to Berlin together to clear out the apartment there and leave Germany behind completely.

She agreed to this too. They set off, leaving the children with their grandmother. Once everything was settled in Berlin, the father flew back to Tunisia and the mother was to join him a few days later. She went to a travel agency to book the flight. And there, among the strangers, she began to cry. She couldn’t stop crying. A woman turned to her with concern. And the mother began to tell her story.

It turned out that this woman was a women’s rights activist. She took up the matter and contacted two lawyers. A plan was drawn up and implemented as quickly as possible: The lawyers called Virginia, the eldest, to the grandmother’s house. She was to wait with her younger siblings at a bus stop on a fixed day at a fixed hour. The lawyers would pick her up there.

The day came, Virginia ran off with the two others, sat down at the agreed place, the lawyers arrived, they drove to the airport, boarded the plane and landed in Berlin. In the evening, the mother received a telegram from the father: „You’ve won.“

The police asked the mother to move away and conceal the identity of the children, as they never knew how the father might react.

This is where the story of the gentle Yasmina ends. This is where the story of the determined Gabi begins, who expressly wanted this common German name in order to bury the Yasmina life. When her sister wanted to talk to her about what happened back then, Gabi would only say: „I can’t remember.“

In Bodelshausen near Tübingen, where the family now lived, Gabi crawled out of her cocoon. She went dancing. She went to Mexico as an au pair. She acquired a kind of adolescent stroppiness. If someone asked her: „Why are you looking so stupid?“, she would reply: „You’re looking stupid yourself.“ Virginia says: „She was my favorite revolver. Nothing could go uncommented on.“

I want to save the world!“

After school, Gabi became a paralegal and worked in a renowned law firm in Tübingen, which represented too many wealthy people for her taste. She preferred to help support those who were powerless and defenceless in the maze of laws and regulations. She therefore joined a small left-wing association that campaigned for politically persecuted people and those facing deportation. In Berlin, where she returned in 1996, she continued this work in a law firm on Mehringdamm. She toyed with the idea of becoming a lawyer, simply because she had this sentence in mind: „I want to save the world!“ She enrolled at university, but dropped out after a short time. It was all far too theoretical. She wanted it to be concrete, immediately, and got involved in the „Investigation Committee“, a legal aid group that looks after people arrested at left-wing demonstrations and provides lawyers, for example for activists at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, where hundreds of thousands took to the streets and many were subjected to police violence and ended up in custody without legal aid.

When she started as a paralegal, she said: I’ll do this for 25 years, then something else will come along. And something else came, after 25 years. A friend gave her the idea: how about becoming a mortician?

Without being able to explain it, Gabi immediately had the feeling that it was exactly what she wanted. She completed an internship with a mortician in Freiburg and was even more sure of herself afterwards than before.

She said it as often as anyone would listen: I have the best job in the world! Of course the questions came: Don’t you mind dealing with death all the time? Isn’t it upsetting to accompany people in their deepest pain? And finally they said: Aren’t you getting far too close to death?

Because it stays away from our apartments and homes, preferring to appear in hospitals and care homes, often outside visiting hours. It is like an annoying disease that the living must not allow to infect them. „Of course, I’m also terrified of dying,“ she said in a radio interview. „But I’m not so afraid of death.“ In Mexico, Gabi had learned that death is not just a gray, terrifying creature. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is a festival. People go to the cemeteries, listen to music, dance, eat, drink, the dead return to the living for a few hours.

No more embarrassed, no more mendacious words

Gabi looked at the often bleak but expensive funeral process in this country. She wanted to do things differently and founded her own funeral home together with colleagues in 2011. No more embarrassed, mendacious words to the faces of the bereaved. No mechanical condolences. No fantastic prices. She often recited two lines from Mascha Kalèko’s poem „Memento“: „Remember: you only die your own death,/ But you have to live with the death of others.“

„My very first goal,“ she explained on the radio, „is to give people a good farewell, in whatever form they want to say goodbye.“ If someone wanted to paint the coffin colorful – fine! If a Buddhist ritual was required – let’s include it in the ceremony! A few times, Gabi asked the police to cordon off entire streets because the funeral processions were so long.

Above all, time is important, peace and quiet, not a hasty coffin selection, a few flowers quickly, quickly, pieced-together, empty sentences about a whole life. She listened. Searched for the presumed wishes of the deceased, linked them to the wishes of the bereaved. Gave them both a voice. Weeks often pass between the death and the funeral. During this time, she often formed close bonds with the relatives. It was always clear to her that she could not make people’s grief her own. She had to turn to them and at the same time keep the pain away from herself. How else could she provide comfort and stability?

Once it was different. She accompanied a woman whose mother had died. At the funeral service, she sat in the pew, everyone sang „Wer einst stirbt“ and Gabi thought to herself that her mother would also like to hear this song. She began to cry painfully.

And the old story, when Gabi was still Yasmina? She visited her father in Tunisia again in 1992. It was a wonderful two weeks, she got to know her father’s new family, her half-siblings, they laughed a lot. But at the end of the trip, Gabi said: „I’m never coming back here. It was a break, even though everything had gone well.

Her father died a few years later. Gabi decided to go to therapy, and hardly anyone knew about it. She continued to present herself as this energetic, self-determined person that everyone wanted to be friends with. Do you know each other?“ a friend once asked her in amazement in the supermarket, pointing to the cashier. No, they didn’t know each other, Gabi had simply turned to the woman and chatted warmly.

Very early in the morning, she got up before everyone else, sat down in the kitchen with a coffee and dealt with her correspondence, she was overly punctual, she went to bed before everyone else. At a coffee table, she plucked at all the pretty pieces of cake set out in the middle and unabashedly tasted every variety. She didn’t even seem to notice the irritated looks. She argued and interfered in other people’s child-rearing without being asked. Her sister says that Gabi could also be ungracious: Either she loved someone to the grave or she broke up. She never wanted to be Yasmina again, the conformist, despondent girl!

Then came the illness. Tumor, a horrible word, in French the consequence sounds very clear: tu meurs, you die. Gabi was a rational person and yet there was this magical thinking in her head. „I thought,“ she said, „we morticians never die!“ As if, because she was constantly dealing with death, she was protected from it. As if she had a companionable relationship with him. Was there no chance of negotiating with the old acquaintance now?

The cancer had been with her since her first diagnosis in May 2018, even if it seemed as if it had gone for a small six-month period. She decided to try something new once again. The work in the funeral collective had exhausted her, too much paperwork, tensions with colleagues. Now she opened her own funeral home, a room in the Genezarethkirche on Herrfurthplatz, Neukölln, still thinking she had the best job in the world.

The chemotherapy didn’t work. Her half-siblings from Tunisia asked if they could contact her again. Gabi thought about it for a while. And then agreed. She said one sentence over and over again: „I really want to go on living!“ And, at the very end, when her fear of dying had given way, one last sentence: „Finally, sleep.“

Published on 04/12/2023 by Tagesspiegel