Menu Icon Menu Icon Arrow Icon Arrow Icon Plus Icon Plus Icon Minus Icon Minus Icon HFF Logo HFF Logo
  • / 4

  • / 4

  • / 4

  • / 4

Pain & Repair

Currently, several million objects of non-European origin sit within ethnological museums across Germany. Severed from the sites which once gave them their intended purpose and meaning, their unsettling presence is now a testimony to a ugly colonial past.
At a time of renewed interest in debates about restitution and repatriation, the film “Pain and Repair” is an attempt to approach the manifold questions that these objects invoke.

Through quiet observations of a choir, a tour guide, a restorer and two technicians within a Munich museum, the film paints a portrait of a space that oscillates between ambivalence, and anxiety. Drawing parallels with the physical experience of loss, this historically charged space appears as both a site of remembrance and the perpetuator of painful privation.