It was a dark afternoon in late October when my plane flew over the Channel. I was 23 and it was the first time I travelled abroad on my own. When the pilot switched off the engine and began the landing, I wished the flight would last longer, for ever possibly, but the lights of the airport were already visible from below. I felt my heart pounding loud, as if beating in a large empty room.

At the passport check a border police guard scanned my photo on my document for a few seconds, then returned it to me with a quick Wilkommen. For some reason I did not felt so.The coach was waiting outside and drove for over an hour on the highway across the dark forests of Westphalia. It was raining now and the road was a black ribbon, the wild grass gnawing at the edges.

When I arrived to K, the university offices were already closed, so I had to put up in a hotel near the rail station. They gave me a double room for the price of a single, although I would have preferred a single for the price of a half. I sat on the starchy coverlet of the large bed and hauled my wet suitcase on the other side. The sandwich with cold ham and the insanely fizzy water I bought from the vendor machine in the lobby were Prussian in spirit: functional and overwrought at the same time. The room overlooked an empty car park, dimly lit by the orange light of a streetlamp. There was something sinister in the deep folds of the curtains that hanged from the wall so I lay down and turned my head on the other side. I kicked off my wet converse and coiled next to my suitcase.

The morning after was grey and cold. The city looked artificial, like a theatre set. Under a drizzle, I caught the tram that took me to the university campus. Under the intimidating sign of Universitätverwaltung, I found the registration office. After some papers filling and documents checking I received a stamp on my student pass valid for two semesters. They also equipped me with a map to find my dorm and a welcome leaflet. The officer, a blond man with rosy cheek spoke an impenetrable English, so monotone and robotic that I did not even want to make an effort to engage with: everything was self explanatory anyway. The university was built in the sixties and was a series of cement towers arranged around a concrete square where the auditorium and the canteen sat opposite each other under a bleak sky; a bridge over the tramway connected the university buildings to an elevated commercial area, where a bank, the cafe, two bakeries, a gym, the gp surgery and a supermarket made any trip to the town superfluous. On the edge of the commercial area there was the swimming pool, the glass walls offered a view of solitary male figure fending the waters with unstoppable strokes. A metal flight of stairs let down to a path through the wood. My dorm was a four-storey black cube that stood on a residential street on the other side of the forest.

It had a bar in the ground floor, called Die Vorlesung, that stayed open all night, and a photography lab in the basement. The estate officer who showed me around gave me the keys for a room on the third floor: it was small, but clean and tidy, with a bright window from where I could see the birches and a little sink in the corner opposite my single bed. The shared kitchen was spacious with two red tables and all the best of what German technology has to offer in terms of cookers, fridges, dishwashers and ovens.

My neighbour was a Chinese lady who taught German in Shanghai, but had never been to Germany before; she was baffled by everything in this country and was compelled to document any detail (plug sockets, shop windows arrangements, articles of toiletries and food menus) with her high tech camera. After the estate officer had left and closed the door behind him, I sat at my desk and looked through the window at the green tree that shook silently in the cold wind.

Back in England I was supposed to study journalism, but during my two years at Uni, I had been meandering through all sorts of courses, from film studies to German baroque drama. When I chose “the press coverage of film festivals” as the topic of my final dissertation, I thought I was back on track and decided to go abroad for few months. Never thinking I would end up in a small industrial town in Germany, I rather saw myself spending a balmy autumn in Italy leafing through the archives of the Lido in Venice or sitting at a café on the French Riviera, with my face stuck into a coffee table book in which Liz Taylor's hairdos and husbands were examined with equal attention. The film study tutor was Mr Girthing, a Marxist historian borrowed unwillingly to Cultural Studies, who was partially responsible for the awaking of my political conscience, making me seat through black and white gems he had unearthed from the university archives. It was a small group of aficionados who followed his screenings in the basement of the library on late friday afternoons , an eerie silence echoing across the empty building as the rest of the students and teachers were already in the pubs getting ready for the weekend ahead.

One morning in March, a the air bright and crisp as a sheet left to dry in the northern wind, as I climbed the stairs of the cultural studies department, I heard a female voice call my name. I turned around and saw Therese. She was in my class but we had hardly spoken before. All I knew was her name and that she was from Ireland, but only from her accent when she spoke in the class, which it was often, as she always had opinion about everything.  She had long auburn hair and always wore cardigans with a knit ties and heavy woollen skirt.

"Arno, she gasped as she reached the top of the stairs, Are you coming to The Taste of Honey too?"

"Yes, I guess, so"

"Sweet, because I hate watching film on my own". she looked in her bag for a cigarette and I shifted impatiently on my feet

"What, we have time don't we?"

"I don't know..."

"Have you picked your topic?" she said blowing blue smoke in the cold air.

When I shooked my head, she seemed horrified.  I made vague excuses and started talking about european festivals

"Cannes and Venice are totally overblown, don't you think?  I mean unless you unless you are into that sort of things. And she made an expression as she she meant dismembering bodies or eating rotten food

I looked in dismay.

Well you must talk to Mr Girthing, then, he's so knowledgeable and surprisingly well connected. 

When we enter the room, the film has already started, the projector wheezing in the darkened room as we crept along the aisle like two thieves in the night and sat in the third row next to each other . Once settled Therese was completely taken by the movie, while my gaze often wandered off to her profile, lit by the silver light of the screen: with her little nose and thin lips she looked like a start of the Swedish mute cinema.When the lights went back on she turned around and  smiled at me with knowing eyes.

I ambled toward mr Girthing who was fiddling with the projector. He had a balding head, with a bristle beard and small warm eyes behind thick lenses. I told him that Cannes and Venice where too glitzy and I wanted something grittier.

“Well you must go to K. then”, he said

“Where?”

“It’s a town in west Germany that hosted a very influential short film festival during the 70s”.

“Oh..” I didn’t have any other opposition.

“The debate it had engendered has long been overlooked in the English speaking world. It’s a great opportunity for research”

“I guess so…” I muttered

“I will get in touch with a colleague who will be in K to give a paper in January. He can also help you with the bibliography. It will mostly be in German but I remember you took some language classes, didn't you?”

I seriously doubted the First I got in German drama was enough to convince my department that my interest in the K. short film festival was genuine and that my knowledge of the language was sufficient. but both him and Therese were positive. In April I filled my application and Mr Girthing signed it. 

In the last part of the semester Therese and I started to see each other more regularly. We would meet after lesson and skipped all the students meetings  to go together to the movies, or we walked and walked until it was pitch dark and we not longer knew where we were and how to get back. I would offer to get a cab but she always refused, almost offended and instead she would strut up and down the roads looking for a bus stops and conjuring from the maps printed on the shelters a safe way for our return. I must say, I would have been disappointed if she had accepted a cab, as our rides back to town were my favourite part,  when she would would collapsed next to me, spent, exhausted, with her hand resting on my arm. For some reason I thought she would not have acted the same in a cab, where the she would have felt the obliged to strike a conversation with the driver, as she always did in the presence of strangers. It struck me how such a reserved, almost secretive person like her - she hardly talked about herself or her family- was not only prone to chatting up strangers, any type, old ladies, little boys, shop girls, van drivers, but how those she approached immediately fell for her charms and would start talking about the most personal matters; it was as if she had the keys to everybody's soul. But the anonymity of the public space offered by the night bus seemed not to prompt any civil duty. 

There was little in our lives that stood in our way.  Therese suffered of insomniac, or so she told when I asked her why she never picked up the phone when i called in the morning. She told me how every night she went to bed at a reasonable time and strived to stay still but after hours of feigning sleep she would become restless and leap out of bed.

"And what do you do?" I asked. I found it difficult to understand her battle as I am one of the lucky people who falls asleep when their head touch the pillow

" I mostly watch TV. There are lot's of very good movies late at night. Or I take a bath and draw on my sketchbook". 

She washed her hair every day and I loved the way they shone in that particularly warm spring, and how her skin , although very pale in winter, turned golden quickly as we spent time in the rooftop of the library. We discovered that the cleaners did not bother to lock the door that gave access to the roof and we used to sneaked up there with beers and drinks  just before five. One evening we risked to be locked in as we missed the closing time. We rushed downstair and we found the main door locked. We fumbled in the dark corridors looking for the house keeper but we could not find him anywhere. Therese was especially frantic as her father was in town for work and he was supposed to take her out for dinner. At the end we found a professor in on of the offices upstairs and we made excuses saying we were working in one of the classrooms and did not realised it was closing time. He seemed most shocked that we were there but also guilty as we probably caught him as much as he caught us and he let us out with bland words of reproach. People often thought we were going out together but we weren't, or at least we did not sleep together. When we were out, she burst into laughter, leaning against the wall. The sun had long set under the horizon, but a white light still lingered in the sky

I must hurry up Arno, she said, call me tomorrow, if you are free

It took several weeks before she invited me to her place. It was the day before she was supposed to leave that she casually dropped an invitation to her place, for tea, she said, to show me her sketches. She lived in a old big house on the other side of the city and as I crossed the bridge I felt like going through the looking glass. Every thing looked the same as in the northern part, the same red brick victorian houses and the sharp spires rising from the parish churches,  and yet was slightly but unmistakably  different: the buildings were older and weirder, as if the architect had gone insane and created a world with its own rules. There seemed to be more space between on  building and the next, as if some of them had mysteriously disappeared. The streets were long and wide, but I could not see a single soul.  The trees were bare, as if it was still dead winter. When I arrived I had to concede that despite the bleakness of the area, her house had the vantage of being very spacious with tall ceilings and wide windows over a park, which seemed heavenly from there, but I knew it from the papers as a place not to venture in after the sunset.   Henrik had kept the flat very modern and stylish, with few pieces of modernist furnitures and cool printings on the white washed walls. Therese's room was on the second floor and so spartan that I gasped when I entered it for the first time. There was only an iron bed and a French armoir, a naked bulb hanging from the stuccoed ceiling  (the books, I discovered later, were hidden in the suitcase under the bed). The entire wall opposite the bed was taken by two huge canvasses and the smell of turpentine, together with the jars full of brushes lined over a rickety table, revealed that she was the author and that had painted them right in that room. The paintings were deceptively simple and bold, with vigorous brush strokes and strong lines. Even to my inexperienced eye it was clear that she had an instinct for colours as her purples and aquamarine swam on the surfaces without clashing. They were feminine, but by no means girlish. I felt invited in and repelled at the same time by them, as by world that draws strength  from within but that would not allow any intrusion. What surprised me was how the painting were mature, definitive. 

"Therese, they are amazing" I said. It sounded rehearsed but it was genuine and I was profoundly moved by her talent and modesty, since she had never mentioned  anything about it, although I had gathered she had a passion for art as she often dragged me to see exhibitions.

 "Look how many layers here, she would point out, standing for long minutes before a canvas I would have not looked twice, "That daub of red and a hint of gold in the corner, is it not heavenly, Arno? I mean, it is still but you can almost see moving and changing, like the sky, right?

In her room now, with her hair tied back on her head and an oversize smock on, she looked so small next to her paintings that for the first time I almost gave in to the impulse I had since I first sat next to her in the cinema and hugged her. But I did not, instead I ran my eyes on the the hardened paint on the canvas, as if it was a wound and I would not believe it true unless I could touch it.  She shrugged and chose a brush from the jar filled with dense transparent liquid and started drying it on a white cloth. Than she drew a portfolio from under the bed and started to spread papers on a floor. The wind was shaking the windows as I sat down to look closer. They sketches were more abstract than the paintings and  more nervous, but I could see the same closed, conclusive lines. 

"They are beautiful", I said, caressing the paper with my hand, following the line with my forefinger towards a centre where the colours clotted in a thick stain of reddish grey.

For the month of August I was signed to work at the swimming pool of a newly refurbished hotel in Norfolk that had been languishing for decades. The new developer had intended to

attract rich customers from the capital, who didn't want to get on a plane and were looking to experience an “old fashioned British holiday with all the comforts of global glamour”. It rained the whole season.

Every morning the sun tried hard to pierce the thick blanket of clouds and almost convinced us that it would have eventually made it. Full of hope I scrambled to the pool early in the morning, the air still cool and green, and scooped the leaves out with a fishnet attached to a long stick; perching on my tall seat I stared the tiles at the bottom of the pool magnified under the chlorined water until the few families arrived with the children and broke the stillness with a splash, while the elderly couples sat quietly under the shades, exchanging the odd words over the pink copies of the FT or heavy tomes of military and maritime history.

Like a brooding god who knows how fleeting is the joy of the humans, I watched the pine tree tops shaking under the darkening sky. When the first drops would start to fall, the dads locked their iphones and rushed to drag the children out of the waters while mothers still covered in sun cream stood with the towels stretched between the arms, ready to wrap them around the tiny shoulders of their offspring.

With a strange sense of guilt, as if it was my fault, I would quickly climb down the ladder and walked behind the tall hedges that run arounds the tennis courts. From there, unseen by the hotel director who had already regretted his decision of hiring me for the whole season, I staggered up the tall dunes covered by wild grass and reached the beach.

Solitary rocks rose from the sand like remains of long extinct beasts and polished pebbles rolled over the shore as the surf retreated under the grey sky.

I got used to wearing my waterproof and I would cover many miles until the sun broke again through the clouds. An hour walk from the hotel there was a fisher village with a hut turned into a cafe.

The first days I was the only customer sitting on the porch and no one came out and take my order.On a particularly stormy day, the pages of a newspaper I grabbed from the hall before I had left, flying every where while i tried to hold them down with plastic ashtrays, a lady appeared from the door and helped me collect my things.

She welcomed me into the inside, which was so deep and dark that the lights where already on, despite being a late morning of a supposedly summer day.

As she took my waterproof and hang it on the door, I told her I was working for the hotel, but only for the season, for I was studying in London. She seemed very pleased with that. She asked me about my exams and what I wanted to do and who I wanted to become; she was eager to know my plans for the future and said I should not think I was too young for anything.

"Life is for grab", she exclaimed with her hands stretched in front of her, as if life was an invisible slippery thing hovering between us in that God-forsaken strip of sand between the north sea and the east Anglian marshes. My vague and mumbling answers did not abate her enthusiasm which actually grew stronger each time I changed my mind about my aspirations; the infinite possibilities stretching in front of me that made me feel so lost as on the edge of an abyss and which i tried to elude switching courses at the uni driving my parents insane, filled her with unspeakable delight.

Her name was Hanna and the tone of her voice, young and cheerful contrasted with the sunken demeanour of someone who has not slept or eaten for years. Her frame was slender but her head hanged from the neck, like a wilted rose.

I got into the habit to go to the cafe almost every day

Hanna, I would call, shaking the rain from my coat and handing it to her she she arrived from the dark corridors of the cafe, I'm here

Over her summer dress, she always wore the same apron with the blue or green flower pattern that had long faded, and one seam on the front pocket had come undone.While we were making plans for my bright future, me sitting on the wooden armchair, her standing in front of me leaning against the door, with her wry smile and the grey hair straddles across her face, like a little girl who has just returned from her games in the fields, how many times I wanted to stretch my hand and pull that loose thread that hang over her bosom. But she did not mind it and kept shoving her hand in the pocket, and rest her small wrist over the unravelling seam.We spent many hours pondering over the my options and which countries I should visit during the gap year we established I should take before taking a career defining decision. She had been to India when she was younger and highly recommended it,

It will open your eyes, she said

Under her furrowed brow, her light green eyes sparkle with mischief, especially when she was taking the cake from the oven and placed it on the formica table.

"Let's not tell Tom", she whispered pointing with her kitchen knife toward the front door and then, sinking the blade in the cake, served me with a generous slice.

Tom was her husband, who was always on the beach, constantly dragging the easy chairs out from the shed and then back in, when the rain started again, like an Anglian Sisyphus, who instead of climbing the hill had to plod through the sand and stare at the watery waste.

Hanna who was very chirpy and energetic in the morning, suffered migraine attacks almost every day and after lunch retired upstairs where she would lie in bed with the blinders shut."I never sleep", she revealed once. I would usually take the cue and walk back to the hotel, but one day, as the rain was falling harder than usual, I stayed behind. The house was silent and I could hear the waves rolling outside.

Behind the kitchen I knew there was another room: on many occasion I has seen Hanna coming out of the door and shut it behind her.

Now the door was in front on me, a narrow wooden door with a brass handle When I heard Hanna'breathing become regular I felt the main reason I stayed was to see what was in the room. With an audacity I did not think myself capable from i strode through the small kitchen and grab the handle. The door was not locked.

Inside, a small bedroom the window facing the sea, on the walls, lined up on the shelves incredibly detailed hand-painted models of boats gathered dust along with postcards from exotic places and overexposed polaroids. In most of the photos a handsome boy appeared again and again at different ages; in one photo, he was a around my age, lifting a young looking Hanna in his strong arms; in another younger but with the same fair eyes and cheeky smile maybe 13 he was with Tom, both in fishing gear standing by the door. He was always looking straight in the camera, while the others looked at him.

Under the shelves a single bed was neatly done, the figure of a sailor embrodied over the pillow. On the night table an interesting collections of books , an almost new copy of Moby Dick, battered volumes of Tolkien, a handful of Icelandic sagas, Jules Verne and other children books .Neither Hanna nor Tom struck me as readers, -I often Saw Hanna handling one of my books as if it was an alien objects, staring at the cover as if it was a blank surface, quickly flickering through the pages and handing it back to me, as if it was some old specimen of which she understood the value, but it was of no use to her.

Without asking permission I began spending the afternoons in the room behind the kitchen, the sound of the dripping tap from the sink like a metronome to give me the rhythm as I read aloud. Few times I saw Tom walking past the door that I left ajar and I was sure he had seen me too.

One day I must have stayed longer and when Anna came down for supper, she found me sitting on the floorboards engrossed in the love triangle betweenGuðrún, Kjartan andBolli,

"What are you doing in here?"

She snapped, collecting the books I spread across the floor and carefully re-arranged them on the shelves from where I had taken them.

"They were Ollie's" She slammed the books on the surface, one of the boat model fell on the floor.

"Sorry, I said, picking it up. One of the tiny oars was broken. Hoping she would not noticing it, I slid the splinter in my pocket and gave her the boat.

"He was studying at the naval college - she continued, taking the boat in her hand and stroking it with her thumb- but he would come to spend his summer holiday with us. He said he did not mind not going with his friends to Spain or Greece. He liked the sea here better."

I listened and then held out the book I was reading,

"You can read it, just put it back when you finished," she said and left the room.

The day after when I went to the cafe, I found her sitting on the porch, her eyes cast down. The little boat was still in her hands, now folded on her lap

She raised her chin and said: "I could not find the oar."

"I got it", I said, and handed her back the piece.

She seemed confused,

"Thank you" she said.

I stood awkwardly next to her

"Do you want to come in?"she finally said

"No thank you. I came to say goodbye; I am going back to London tomorrow."

She smiled at me, than she rose to her feet and went in. Tom was a few yards from us, bent over the pebbles to collect driftwood and litter washed up by the tide. When he heard my steps creaking over the floorboard of the porch, he straightened his back and looked in my direction. I had never noticed before how I tall he was. there was something in the shape of his shoulders or the way he stood that reminded me of the boy in the photos, but at the same time he was nothing like him; as much as the Ollie seemed to make the air spin around him, Tom cut a dark figure against the big clouds running across the sky. He lifted his arm and shielded his face from the light. He said something but the wind stole the words; I wave my hand and walked away.

On my last day, the sun finally shone and a warm breeze blew from the sea, I was so happy to leave that I rushed to the station without stopping at the director's office to collect my weekly pay. It was arranged to be sent to my address in London.

Two weeks later I received my cheque and a parcel from Hanna. It was the Laxdaele saga, the book I was reading when she found me in her son's room.Before I could think, another letter slipped through my fingers. It was from the University: my application had been accepted. I was granted funds for two terms, which it meant I had to start to pack immediately.

I can’t remember whether it was because of some delay with the funding, or simply the school year started earlier in Germany than in England, but I arrived a month later than expected.

Missing all the introductory events that the university had organised for the foreign students meant that my opportunities to get to know my peers in an informal context were lost. During the first weeks I did meet a few people but didn’t strike a bond with any of them. They were fleeting figures whom I spoke briefly to and didn’t see ever again. Or maybe I did but didn’t notice.

When I was 17 I had been diagnosed with a mild cognitive disorder, called prosopagnosia which means I have difficulties to recognising faces. I was never able to say ‘hi’ to our

neighbours or wave to one of my brother’s friends, if they didn’t take the initiative. They thought I was rude, maybe a snob, surely odd.

The doctor who diagnosed me explained to my parents that in some people the condition makes people unable to recognise their long-term partners or children, but that was not my case.Usually I am not able to distinguish two persons if I met them at the same time, no matter how different they are from each other: their features blend

into one, although slowly I can tell them apart them from their voices. I tend to develop a very strong attachment to the few people my mind decides to remember, but I usually tend to stick to my playground and old acquaintances.

In B. I filled my schedule with seminars that I was not really interested in and trips to the library where I slowly made myself familiar with the complicated index system, their

opening times, borrowing hours and returning deadlines. As for the staff, I made no effort to establish any friendly relationship, as I was never sure the person in front of me now was the same who helped me the day before.

During the weekend the university stayed closed, so I would take the tram and treat myself to a light breakfast in a nice café in town, followed by a trip to Japanese garden, if it was not

too cold or to the local museum of industrialisation. 

Once I forgot I was in a country whose language I didn’t not master and entered a bookshop; the smell of paper was tempting but as I approached the shelves I realised I made a mistake. I

looked helplessly at the lines of volumes, not even daring to open one. The pages stayed shut, like mouths that would not speak. A shop girl thought I needed help and started toward me with an alarmingly encouraging smile. I feared my bluff was about to be called and found refuge in the cookery section; I grabbed a hardback volume, on the cover there was a smiling oriental man holding a wok where colourful vegetables were being tossed with brown noodles;

it looked easy fragrant and safe. I went to the till and paid without uttering a word.

The book was by no means easy and safe; it became in fact my personal Vietnam, for its subtle but implacable way to defeat any attempt to tackle it, but also my saviour because it absorbed me completely and made me forget my first weeks of complete loneliness. The ingredients were unheard of in the any groceries from Saxony to Pomerania, and I imagined sacks of kaffir leaves and cardamon seeds travelling unsteadily on the silk road, been stopped at the custom and lost somewhere near Samarkand. The recipes were vaguely sketched, leaving far too much to one’s own common sense and the photos, far from being helpful showed unattainable perfection of culinary deftness. Undeterred by my failures I ploughed through it with the stubborn blindness of a veteran entrenched in a war he has not faith to win, but no gut to abandon either.

Eventually I got a chinese ally: Xie, my neighbour, was also a keen cook, and despite the language barriers we found a way of communicating over the kitchen board.

My first weeks in east Germany turned out to be a real apprenticeship in oriental cuisine and I learned some fabulous tricks on how to chop the onion without having my eye weeping as if I was watching Bambi’s mother’s death on a big screen, or how to shave carrots and

courgette to cook them evenly.She also revealed how to find substitutes for the ingredients; my trips to the supermarket began to be less erratic and aisles that I had long ignored, became my second home. In the evening I would lay my shopping on the table in the kitchen and

studied for a few minutes. Ben and Chris, who usually arrived to the dorm after a football match and devoured some ready meal that they do not even bother to

shove into the microwave, looked at me with amused respect.

Xie would always praise my attempts with a large smile on her flat face and never failed to take a photo of the dish that I neatly arranged on the terracotta plate I had found at the

back of one of the cupboards in the kitchen -surely the legacy of a former guest of the black cube. Once her meal was ready, she would leave the kitchen with her tray of steaming rice or soup, to be eaten in the privacy of her room, while talking to her husband on the computer.

My food remained almost untouched, as the little morsels I snatched during the laborious preparations were sufficient to placate the little appetite left after hours of strained

concentration. So I sat at the table, as if waiting for an important guest who failed to attend despite having accepted an invitation. On the terracotta plate the food was getting cold and dry, the batter began to sag and soften, the sauce was getting thicker and listless.

Finally I would rise, scoop everything in a plastic container and place it on the shelf inside the fridge that I was allocated. There were cans of beer on the door (Ben and Chris) and

half dozen of Tupperware of every shape and size on the first shelf (Xie).

It was only when the humming of the fridge would suddenly resonate in the empty kitchen that I became quickly aware of my solitude.

The strip of light streaming form the open fridge cut through the length of the room till the window on the other side. It was pitch dark but I could see the bare trees of the forest shaken by nocturnal shivers. As I leaned my forehead to the window, I saw group of people

clambering out of the thicket and making their way inside my building. The stream was slow but constant until Die Vorlesung reached full capacity. Every time someone opened the door to enter or to come out for a cigarette or a private talk with a girl, the music poured out loud for few seconds. Although tempted, I didn’t dare going down for fear of having to stand alone in a corner or, even worst, of having someone coming up to me to say ‘hi’, of whom I did not have any recollection.  Instead I locked myself into my room, trying desperately to translate snippets of German newspapers about the B short film festival I photocopied from the library.