DARK SPRING

Ingemo Engström

Germany

- 1970

In the words of its director, ‘Dark Spring’ is «a film about women’s utopias of love. What it shows is how a woman experiences a sense of déjà-vu when she is at the end of a fixed relationship and the start of a utopian one. Encounters with other women are also shown, who reflect on their own relationships and on other possible forms of being together. Their testimonies remain authentic even when placed in a context that draws on staging».

Ingemo Engström

Writer, director and producer, she was born in Jakobstad, Finland, in 1941. She studied Psychology, Medicine and Literature in Helsinki, Hamburg and Munich and wrote a study about the use of imagery in the writings of Ingeborg Bachmann. From 1967 to 1970 she also studied at the Academy of Film and Television (HFF) in Munich, together with Wim Wenders, Werner Schroeter, and above all Gerhard Theuring, with whom she lives and works to this day. Between ‘Dark Spring’ (1970), her graduation film, and ‘Mrs. Klein’ (1995), she has made eight feature-length films. One of them, ‘Fluchtweg nach Marseille’ (1977), she co-directed with Theuring, another, ‘Erzählen’ (1975), with Harun Farocki. Engström’s films produce their own feeling of rhythm and duration. They are connected to one another by motifs (car journeys, bodies of water, music) and recurring actors (Rüdiger Vogler, Katharina Thalbach, her daughter Muriel Theuring).