German director Luise Donschen follows her own path, to put it mildly. Her 2018 debut feature, Casanova Gene, was a daring conceptual project that, in some respects, barely held together as a film. Using the mating patterns of finches as its governing conceit, the film took us to a wide array of locations, including a rather Fassbinderian singles’ bar, a BDSM parlor, and backstage at a theater for an unexpected cameo by John Malkovich. If there was a primary takeaway from Casanova Gene, it was that sexuality (human and otherwise) is dazzling and confusing in its infinite variety.
By comparison, Donschen’s latest film is much more unified, but that doesn’t make it any more straightforward. What it does clarify is that Donschen organizes her films according to thematic ideas that function like the tonal key of a musical composition, anchoring the material without nailing down a particular narrative meaning. Or put another way, we could say about Donschen what Jonathan Rosenbaum once said about Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Snow, and Jerry Lewis: that they are more interested in fields than in plots.
The title of Donschen’s new film, Tomorrow a Long Time Ago, seems paradoxical, until you realize that it isn’t. It refers to a concept of the future from a previous moment, a vision that was promulgated but most likely never came to pass. In this case, the director is referring to the 1990 reunification of Germany, a situation that followed from great excitement and fanfare — the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the arrival of democracy in the East, the end of the Stasi and its paranoid police state. In practical terms, however, it involved sudden inflation, the devaluation of the East German mark, and thousands out of work as entire industrial sectors were thrown into the deep end of privatization.
Tomorrow follows the post-reunification journey of Patty (Gerti Drassl), a quality inspector at a 35mm film plant who loses her job when the factory is decommissioned. However, Donschen neither tells this story allegorically nor metonymically. Patty is not somehow representative of the East German plight. She and the film that contains her are entirely too idiosyncratic for that. In fact, initially it seems that Tomorrow has an entirely different protagonist. The opening scenes focus not on Patty but on Jelena (Manuela Biedermann), a middle-aged woman we first see drawing plants in the forest.
She wends her way to the Peasants’ War Panorama, the hilltop museum in Bad Frankenhausen that contains the massive 360-degree painting Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1976-87) by East German artist Werner Tübke. Based on the discussion she has with a museum employee, it seems she has been tasked with replicating the homemade primer that was created for Tübke’s canvas. Later, after leaving the museum and heading back down the hill, we see her lying on the ground, her unmoving body being drawn by a young girl (Nele Christoph) who is actually the young Jelena. We see Patty bidding her goodbye at the train station, Jelena now having been replaced by her younger self.
This is the first of several indications that time is out of joint in Tomorrow a Long Time Ago. The film takes a literal fact — that for East Germans, the end of GDR represented the collapse of an entire way of life — and expands it into the metaphysical realm, as a rupture in time and space. We see Patty go to the bank and convert her money to the new Deutschmarks, and half the value is gone. And then we see the employee toss the old coinage in a massive bin for disposal.
This is factual, material, economic. But other changes in Patty seem to follow from this logic of monetary devaluation. The philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux, in his book Symbolic Economies, suggests that money is the universal equivalent, and when its connection to value is disrupted, it causes ripples within other economies: political, sexual, psychological, etc. So at first it might seem odd that middle-aged Patty takes a much younger lover, Franz (Clemens Bobke), or that she begins hoarding random discarded objects. But in fact, her “value” or Franz’s within patriarchy are now up for grabs, and all those objects have suddenly been recast as “commodities.” Who or what has value? Who’s to say?
In the final third of Tomorrow, Patty seems committed to reestablishing meaning, getting back to something tangible. She abandons Franz and her overstuffed apartment and goes to live in the woods. She cooks over an open fire. She treats her wounds with roots. She starts planting crops. And as we observe this behavior, the style of the film becomes more linear, more procedural. It’s as if Donschen is collaborating with Patty to lay some new groundwork for shared meaning. And while it appears that she ultimately fails in her quest, she and Donschen make room for Grace (Pola Friedrichs), a young girl who takes over as the film’s main subject. Does she represent the future of a new Germany? Or was she simply a child who happened to find herself in a particular place and time? Perhaps the real question is, can History tell the difference?
Published as part of NYFF 2026 — Dispatch 8.
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