In her documentary family saga WALCHENSEE FOREVER, director Janna Ji Wonders embarks on a voyage of discovery spanning over a century. In order to uncover the secrets and her role in the generation chain, she leads us from the family café at the Bavarian Walchensee lake via Mexico to San Francisco during the “Summer of Love”, Indian ashrams, a German commune and back again and again to lake Walchensee.
Questions about identity, roots and self-fulfillment are asked through this search for life, love and death.
It is a personal story about the eternal cycle of life.

Direction: Janna Ji Wonders

Script: Janna Ji Wonders, Nico Woche

Production: Martin Heisler

Co-Production: Katharina Bergfeld

Cinematography: Janna Ji Wonders, Sven Zellner, Anna Werner

Editing: Anja Pohl

Sound: Jörg Elsner

Original Score: Markus Acher, Cico Beck

Cast: Anna Werner, Norma Werner, Frauke Werner

Original Title: WALCHENSEE FOREVER

Original Language: German

Film Production Country: Germany

Website: http://www.flare-film.com/dokumentarfilme/film.asp?id=14

Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/walchenseeforever

Statement of the Director/s
A framed picture on the wall: Two young women with a dulcimer and a guitar - my mother and her sister.

This picture always fascinated me when I was a child. Looking at it, I would daydream about being like these two beautiful, adventurous women, who were surrounded by a rebellious aura. It was like a window into my mother’s past. A past which held a dark secret. I never got to meet the woman in the picture next to my mother, she mysteriously died before I was born. Still, her memory hovered above our family like a ghostly shimmer. Her sister’s death was a fracture in my mother’s life. From that moment on, my mother was on a continuous search for meaning, dragging me along. What was it, that my mother was looking for? What happened to the great urge for freedom and the ideals of the late 60s?
My father was far away, in San Francisco. I was pained by his absence. My mother’s inner turmoil carried on within me, torn between father and mother, between California and Bavaria. This is why my grandma was my sanctuary, my refuge. Her down-to-earth character, deeply rooted at lake Walchensee, was the antipode to my mother’s restlessness.

WALCHENSEE FOREVER tells the story of my family over four generations from the point of view of women, each of them defying in their own way the patriarchal structures of their time. It’s about these women’s search for identity, roots and self-fulfillment, it’s about love, pain, longing, loss, psychotic conditions, birth, death - the cycle of life.

Biography of the Director/s
Janna Ji Wonders was born in Mill Valley, California, and lives in Munich, Bavaria. She studied at the University of Television and Film Munich, where she directed numerous music videos, shorts and documentaries. Her award-winning films, including the L.A. Hip-Hop documentary BLING BLING and STREET PUNK MOSCOW about young punks in Russia, were shown at international film festivals around the world. With her band YA-HA! she recently released a debut album. Her love for music shapes her work as a filmmaker.

Awards Won
Best Documentary, Bavarian Film Award 2019
Kompass-Perspektive-Preis, Berlinale 2020
Golden Alexander Newcomers Award - Thessaloniki Doc FF 2020
German Cinematography Award (Editing) 2020
Best Film Unipol Award 2020
Audience Award „Der Neue Heimatfilm“ 2020
Audience Award, Fünf Seen Filmfestival 2020

Production Company:
Flare Film GmbH
Allerstr. 18
Berlin, 12049, Germany
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +49 30 762 397 370

World Sales:
Deckert Distribution GmbH
Gottschedstr. 18
Leipzig, 04109, Germany
E-Mail: [email protected]
Phone: +49 341 215 66 38