Film – “Wilma wants more”: Even the woman is

Oberlausitz, in the mid -1990s: Wilma has the faxes thick. Then she has endured retraining after another and collected a number of certificates, even one as a pomologist if you know what that is. Nevertheless, she, who once stood in the lignite power plant in the “area of maintenance”, only “her husband”, only the dreary fate of lack of work and perspective, which she shares with countless others in that leading time of the collapse of the East German economy.

But should that now be your life to move from job creation measure to minijob and to result in ubiquitous depression? No, Wilma wants more. When her husband also enjoys her with another and at the alumni of the brigade “international friendship” her old Brigaden ladder, who took over and now lives in Vienna, Wilma grabs her things without further ado.

The cinematic processing of this era is in full swing; The East German “Heimatfilm” has now become a genre.

In the meantime, word has got around to the West that the fractures and faults of the postal period in the “new countries” dug into the collective memory of the East and messed up and still messed up the unity balance. The cinematic processing of this era is in full swing; The East German “Heimatfilm” has now become its own genre, the success of which is not always, but often depends on where and how the filmmakers were born and socialized. The historical distance alone makes it extremely difficult to hit the right mood and pitch and harbors the danger of shaky failure – as the last year’s clothes “two to one” by director Natja Brunckhorst impressively demonstrated.

Of course, every thesis already carries the antithesis; The director and author of “Wilma wants more”, Maren-Kea Freese in 1960, spent her childhood and youth in Hamburg, Ingolstadt and Cologne-West German. Nevertheless, her film is pleasantly shaped by knowledge and empathy. On the one hand, the story of a woman who does not sit with her fate and explores her place in life is universal enough to work regardless of the historical background. On the other hand, the success of the film has a lot to do with the great actor ensemble, which Freese has gathered. The title heroine is played by Fritzi Haberlandt, who experienced the upheaval of the 1990s as a teenager. Born in 1975 in East Berlin, she belonged to that legendary vintage at the Ernst Busch Show Game School, which Lars Eidinger, Devid Striesow, Nina Hoss and Mark Waschke also come from. Their representation of the Wilma is congenial and carries the film over long distances, is a one-Woman show, so to speak.

The naturalness with which Wilma tackles, where there is something to tackle without making a lot of guise, helps her in Vienna through the hard start, and while she has to go to the workers’ line as a day laborer at the beginning, she soon repaired the Viennese suburbs as an electricalist. Wilma also makes it easy for Vienna of the 1990s, as Freese designs it; The mentality seems familiar, the grumpy directness and yet openness of the Viennese meetings on East German pragmatism and common sense. This context is not entirely out of air; For the Austrian cabaret artist Lisa Eckhart, who has been living in Leipzig for a few years, East Germans and Austrians are basically closer than Ossis and Wessis. This feeling of connection is already stirring from a “certain way, as the West sees us”, as she explained in an interview in 2023. From a West German perspective, Ösis are somehow German, but also a bit Slavic because of the historical relationship with Hungary and the Balkans. The same applies to the Ossis with their Eastern Bloc past. In fact, relationships between Austria and the GDR were very special, especially in delimitation to the FRG. The GDR was also a bit of a “better Germany”, which led to a lively cultural exchange.

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Whether the author was aware of this mixture or not, for her Wilma in any case Vienna becomes refuge, and she discovered what she believed – something like home and security, also love. With her old certificate in »Standard Dance I-III«, she even becomes a teacher in a Wiener Walzer dance school. In search of a room, Wilma ends up in a left-wing Bohème-WG, where she explains feminism from an East German perspective to her roommate and women-moving university lecturer Matilde (Meret Engelhardt): “In contrast to you, Professor, lived in two different political systems, raised a son and was always working!”

The all-round sympathetic flat share scenes culminate in a kind of home evening that Wilma organizes for her new friends and at the climax of which she is the best of the old FDJ-Gassenhauer “Tell me where you stand”. This was so exhausted, empty and literally hated this Agitprop hit at the end of the GDR-in the context of the film and its history and with the historical distance of the decades, the song is suddenly in a new context of meaning and actually creates goosebumps and some melancholy in 2025. The old dream of equality and camaraderie, in “Wilma wants more” he can rise again.

“Wilma wants more”, Germany 2025. Director: Maren-Kea Freese. With: Fritzi Haberlandt, Meret Engelhardt, Valentin Postlmayr. 110 min. Start: July 31