Sterben nicht vorgesehen (2012)

What happens when the future that was meant to last is suddenly in the past? Filmmaker Matthias Stoll’s father was not the type to die, and certainly not as suddenly as he did. A real doer and man of action, he was someone who, throughout his life, was used to taking charge of things; an active and witty pragmatist – regardless of whether he was out on a bike ride, in the office or on the building site for the house that was never finished – but maybe it was never really meant to be completed. Perhaps, and this may have been his father’s credo, the path to happiness was itself paradise. In this film Stoll bids a melancholy farewell to his father; the work takes the form of a humorous, essayistic documentary in which age-old memories are rekindled in animated sketches and cleverly interwoven with documentary footage depicting the family’s past.