POOR AND ELDERLY
(29 min., NDR/ARD broadcasting networks, 2008)
POOR AND ELDERLY
(29 min., NDR/ARD broadcasting networks, 2008)
In 2008, 400,000 retirees in Germany live on a basic income from social security. The trend is on the rise: experts estimate that in 20 years one in three is going to be threatened by old-age poverty. The feature POOR AND ELDERLY (original title: ARM UND ALT) employs moving scenes to show what it means to be elderly with no money. Senior citizens who can scrape together enough for coffee from a vending machine, but not for new glasses or dentures.
Screenplay/Directors: Carsten Rau and Hauke Wendler
Camera: Boris Mahlau
Editor: Dietrich Müller
Commissioning Editor: Erika Mondry
Production: PIER 53 Filmproduktion
VOICES
“POOR AND ELDERLY numbers among the desirable but far too rare social features that inflict a certain uneasiness and are thought-provoking from the start. Carsten Rau and Hauke Wendler document extremely unassuming, by no means out-of-the-ordinary case studies of looming or long-since existing poverty at an old age. They accomplish this in a dedicated yet not overwrought manner, and without pleas for sympathy. (…) The film thus impressively evolves into shameful testimony to incapacity on the part of our society.”
(from the rationale for awarding the Regine-Hildebrandt-Prize)
“It really got to me. When you look at the scenes you’re left with cold fury at the bonus payments for managers.”
(Heide Simonis, former minister-president of the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, in her laudatory speech at the awards ceremony)
