MAJUBS REISE
Eva Knopf | Germany 2013 | 50 Min. | OmeU
„Extras are the night of the cinema. While it strives to be an art that makes stars shine.“ The essayistic documentary MAJUB’S JOURNEY tells the story of an African man named Mohamed Husen. He lived in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and worked as an extra in the movie business and was Zarah Leander’s chauffeur, Hans Albers’ servant and Heinz Rühmann’s liftboy.He was, however, not only an extra in the movie industry. The ’extra’ is also a metaphor for his role in ’big history’: His story isn’t told. He emerges – if at all – only at the very margins.
Mohamed Husen was born in the German colony Deutsch-Ostafrika and became a soldier for the Germans during World War I – when he was only nine years old. After the Germans lost the war, they failed to hand him his pay. About a decade later Husen decides to travel to Germany all by himself and personally collect his outstanding money. He arrives, of all times, in the beginning of the 1930s when the Germans brought the Nazis to power. Thisis a film about the reconstruction of Mohamed Husen’s life – including the holes that the archive leaves open – and it is a film about how the roles society offers us effect our lives.
