In Home Stories, a young woman from the town of Griez in East Germany is selected to compete on a TV talent show—an opportunity that will require her family to do a rare bit of self-reflection. The writer of this conceptually rich idea is Eva Trobish, among the lesser-known directors to emerge from the Berlin School in the last ten years. In that time, however, she has been gradually building a reputation, winning Locarno’s Best First Feature award in 2018 for All Is Well. She followed that story (about a woman trying to process if a bad date had actually been something more serious) with Ivo six years later. A film about a palliative care nurse who enters into a morally questionable relationship, that effort was selected to compete in the last edition of the Berlinale’s Encounters sidebar. With Stories, Trobish graduates to the main competition with a film of fittingly broadened ambitions.
Indeed, Trobish’s first two features had been presented from the POV of a lone protagonist—all the better to zoom in and observe her characters in their times of crisis. With Home Stories, Trobish steps back to expand her purview in an admirable attempt to capture something politically urgent and panoramic—the disillusionment, resentment, and, in some cases, shame that has simmered to a boiling point in the former GDR in the last ten years. To do so, Trobish does away with the singular focus of her earlier work in favor of a sprawling, intergenerational, near-novelistic milieu, and has made a sporadically fascinating film that occasionally stretches itself thin.
If Home Stories has a central protagonist, however, it’s undoubtedly Lea, and the film is at its best when following her through the singing contest—there’s even time for a nice rendition of Coldplay’s “Fix You.” It’s in the surrounding meetings and on-camera interviews with the show’s producer (played by Thomas Schubert of recent Petzold fame) that Trobish finds the framework for Lea to reflect on her family’s history and where she’s from. This, in most cases, would be more than enough for a single film, but Trobish—for better and worse—is out to tell a bigger story.
From Lea’s generation, we soon encounter her cousin and singing partner Bonny (Ida Fischer); Bonny’s brother Edgar (Florian Geißelmann), the most politically outspoken of the group; and their mother Kati (Eva Löbau), a relatively urbane cultural administrator who’s returned to town with a state-funded project to redevelop a local museum and turn the weaving factory where Lea’s grandmother, Christel (Rahel Ohm), worked into a historical site. This endearingly no-nonsense woman now runs the town’s main hotel—an idyllic, once-bustling spot that’s become so desperate for business that they’ve agreed to host a convention for a far-right heritage group. Her son and Lea’s father, Matze (Max Riemelt), is still in love with Lea’s mom, Rieke (Gina Henkel), despite the fact that she’s currently pregnant with another man’s child—who also happens to be the principal of Lea’s school. And yes: it’s a lot to take in.
Like her contemporaries (most notably Maren Ade), the typical editing rhythm of Trobish’s filmmaking has tended to favor jumpy cuts in order to stealthily sneak in unlikely moments of comedy while also avoiding the temptation for lofty monologues or exposition, whatever the seriousness of a film’s themes. What worked wonders in her earlier work doesn’t quite click this time around. The speed with which we follow certain perspectives before losing them altogether results in an occasional sense of disorientation. This isn’t to say that Home Stories is overloaded or that any one section isn’t interesting on its own terms—the issues are more in how they intertwine.
Accordingly, Home Stories is about as uneven as it is ambitious—a film with specificity and something to say, not least in terms of the director’s political worldview. During one interesting sequence, Christel becomes visibly distraught when she sees how much money has been poured into turning the factory into a museum—less because of any easy feeling of nostalgia, necessarily, more for the creeping sense of her life becoming, at best, romanticized by the West and, at worst, embalmed. This is fertile soil for any film, not least one that was in the running for the biggest prize in German cinema. Trobish’s third feature is a little too unwieldy to fully satisfy, but it certainly gives you plenty to chew on.
Home Stories premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.