Mama General

'Mama General', or 'I Would Not Call Us Poor', is a documentary case study. The film follows an unusual family through 20 years. It accurately portrays life on the verge of starvation right in the middle of one the planet´s richest countries. Director Peter Heller met the B. family for the first time in 1976, when he made the first film about them, their worries, their plans and their dreams. 'I met these people in a Cologne suburb. They had just moved away from a hostel for the homeless. They lived in a very economical way in order to slowly advance to a middle class standard of living.' The film team became friends with the family. They stayed in touch throughout the years. Ten years after the first film came out, a second film project was under way: between 1976 and 1986 the B. family had not managed to move out of their public housing into a little house of their own, as they had hoped in the 70s. Some of the children had children of their own by this time. But not a single one had succeeded in casting off the spell of poverty. Now, 20 years after the first encounter, the B. family still lives in an apartment in the same neighborhood. And very few of the children have moved out. Mama B. is still the centre of the family. She appears feeble and slim and she often gets sick, but at the same time, she has remained inexhaustibly energetic. Whenever a family member needs her, she is there.