film_engl

About the film:

‘Wild Mint’ tells the story of a mother-daughter relationship beyond death. It’s the story of strong, courageous, striving women. It’s about partisans and deserters, about survival and the willpower to keep on living. Essentially it’s about the past in the present and the ever-present consequences of NAZI-terror.

Carinthia, December 23rd, 1944: In the city of Graz eight death sentences are being carried out on account of a court ruling by the infamous president of the court called “Volksgerichtshof”, Roland Freisler. Amongst the victims: the communist Maria Peskoller from Villach. Her daughter, 16-year-old Helga Peskoller, is freed and survives. Before that both mother and daughter undergo GESTAPO imprisonment, with them ultimately having to say their last good-byes. For life. Memories eternally imprinted in Helga’s mind and heart. Questions that can never be answered. Images that make no sense. An endless reflection of her memory. What’s left is the pain. The past corrupts the present. ‚Never again’, but Christmas comes every year.

65 years have passed and the young woman from back then is now 80 years old. The images have found meaning. Helga has learnt to love life. Despite the pain. Despite the NAZIS. Out of love for her mother. And that’s that.

She travelled a lot; across the whole wide world: Helga in Italy with a campervan, Helga at picnic on the Pacific Coast, Helga at her weekly choir get-togethers. The kitchen fridge is humming. In the end: the last photograph with her whole family taken in Sonnenstraße in Villach. A scarf. A bracelet. Not much has remained. Reminders of the past are scattered across the kitchen table. They are the starting point of a journey through time into the Carinthia of the 1940ies, into a family’s daily vocation against the NAZI regime. A family whose life was brutally torn apart, in effect still is disrupted yet powerfully remembered.