Sediments follows the traces of a family, uncovering the entanglements of two dictatorships layer by layer. Through the filmmaker’s conversations with her grandfather, we journey through different epochs of German history – National Socialism, the GDR and the post-reunification era. A film about memory and personal responsibility in times of dictatorship.

When they married, Günther and Renate Gerber also pledged allegiance to the communist regime of East Germany—until the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, in an instant, thrust their granddaughter, Laura Coppens, into another world: that of market democracy. To reconcile her childhood memories of the GDR—memories gradually erased from collective consciousness by the reunification with its Western twin—Coppens turned to her grandfather, whose own memory was beginning to fade, and asked him to recount his passage through two dictatorships: first Nazi, then Communist. Sediments, which is structured around excerpts from Christa Wolf’s Patterns of Childhood and interwoven with archival footage and fragments from films (Heise, Buyens, and others), centres on Günther’s biography. Among the revelations that emerge, we discover his collaboration with the Stasi, for whom he wrote “psychological reports” on his colleagues as part of his work as a gynaecologist.
Like an archaeologist, Coppens unearths historical layers without judgment, rendering them visible and tangible through a profound intergenerational dialogue—one that feels all the more vital amid the resurgence of repressed totalitarianism that is once again unsettling German society.

Emmanuel Chicon