3 questions for...Rosa Hannah Ziegler

For the first six months, I visited Biggi, her daughters and Alfred regularly. Without a camera. We got to know each other better bit by bit. The other team members joined us later. We all spent a lot of time together. We then filmed at regular intervals for about a year. It was a collaborative effort with the protagonists. We thought together about what scenes we wanted to shoot - that was very important to me for this film.

The fate of the "actors" or those who let me share their lives with them, for which I am grateful, always gets to me. So that what I experience doesn't get too close to me, I keep my distance and draw clear boundaries. I always remain the filmmaker who is interested in them and their lives. Of course, you take what happens during the day while filming home with you - because the situations we were confronted with were often very tough. We always talked about it as a team so that we could process what we had experienced and seen together.

Although I was born in Hamburg, I grew up in Lüchow-Dannenberg, so I was familiar with a life in the "rural idyll" until I was 20. I grew up in a village with thirty houses. What I miss in the city is the peace and quiet, the forest and meadows right on my doorstep. But a life without all the urban opportunities would be unthinkable for me right now.