SEAHoRSE

“It stands upright in the water and can’t sink,” the swimming instructor encourages the children as they are training for their first swimming badge - the Seahorse. However, the sea creature in the title not only refers to the badge named after it, but also to the area of our brain, the hippocampus, where memories are stored. It serves as our body’s archive, consolidates new memories and weighs possible outcomes.

In SEAHORSE we meet Hanan and her younger brother Sidar. Hanan, a swimming instructor at the local swimming pool, takes her brother to swimming lessons so that he can earn his first badge. - the seahorse. Amid the splashing water, Hanan remembers her family’s arduous journey to Germany. When crossing the Mediterranean Sea with her family in a small rubber dinghy in 2015, she could not swim. After the boat capsized, the fear of drowning got irrevocably burned into her memory. She is determined to have her younger brother learn how to swim before his painful memories to the water surface. SEAHORSE poetically explores the contradictory and unpredictable nature of memory. Hanan tells her story with a determined, yet fragile voice; her account echoing over sometimes abstract images of the water, or images of Sidar and the swimming class. Her voice itself is like the current, silky but rough, shaky, yet a force to be reckoned with. As she bares the strength to face her trauma, the ordinary swimming pool becomes a place of reappraisal.

Director Nele Dehnenkamp created a sensitive portrait of a girl who found new strength by facing her fear and ultimately overcoming it. The director neither puts any particular emphasis on the dreadful backstory, nor does she resort to loaded imagery. Instead, she provides her protagonist with a safe space to tell her story in her own way. The camera merely skims the outer walls of this protective bubble, making palpable the extraordinary trust between the director and her protagonist needed for such a portrayal. Just as hippocampal neurons string together past and future, Nele Dehnenkamp manages to connect Hanan’s account of her traumatic past with the hopes for her brother’s future. The result is a sensitive short film that deals with the traumatic consequences of flight in its own way and brings images back into our heads that are unfortunately all too quickly forgotten.

SEAHORSE received the Special Mention from the GROSSE KLAPPE Youth Jury at the 20th doxs! festival. Endowed by the Federal Agency for Civic Education the award is given since 2011 to productions with an outstanding aesthetical and political approach. Production & Distribution: Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, Christine Duttlinger: christine.duttlinger@filmakademie.de Director: Nele Dehnenkamp Producer: Christine Duttlinger, Nele Dehnenkamp

The Doxspot column is published with the help of the doxs! festival for children & youth documentaries in Duisburg and other cities in the Ruhr Area. www.do-xs.de.