Home is not Home

Home is not home mingles among the residents of Caritas´ St. Peter Nursing Home in Graz, and tells of their everyday lives. In doing so, the film concentrates on four protagonists who are bound in a friendship of sorts based on their relative physical and mainly mental fitness. Liselotte Oman, born in Holland, who had to give up her own home after a stroke, offers the most resistance to her stay in the nursing home. Veronika Pfuhl is celebrating her 97th birthday, almost to her own amazement. Maria Neuhold came to the nursing home with the minister for whom she worked as a cook for forty years, and remained there after his death. Emil Pfeiffer, a former circus director, is best able to cope with the situation. Everyone is capable of creating their own happiness - if they want to, he says. He tells of the "last great love of his life," Hannerl, and provides the necessary entertainment in the nursing home: he cracks jokes, sings the Fiaker song, and dances.
Director Julia Laggner, trained music and art therapist, first visited the nursing home in the course of an art project by uniT (Verein für Kultur, Karl Franzens University Graz). She worked with her protagonists for months and carried out discussions. The four people remain relaxed and direct, also in front of the camera, when they speak out about their lives and the unavoidable topic of death. Home is not home does not waste much time with the past, or even on remembering: those places cannot be shared, there, everyone is and remains alone. Instead, we discover that in their so-called last stage of life people have a present and even a future: when they laugh, and when they dream; when they model in a fashion show, satisfied and proud; and when they sometimes dream together about amorous escapades, with good humor and self irony.

(Sylvia Szely)


Society usually neither thinks nor talks much about what it feels like to live in an old people’s home. Heim ist nicht Daheim presents four persons with very different life stories who seem to be friends in the home, but “outside” that place probably never would have met.

(Diagonale Catalog)