My African Family

Thomas and Lea had never imagined that love could be so demanding. When she saw him for the first time, she thought he made porn movies and that he considered her a prostitute. Thomas Thümena, director and father of Lea’s first child, claims it was love at first sight. She comes from Ivory Coast, he from Switzerland, where the couple now lives. In a lucid style, Thümena films the inevitable problems they run up against: Lea’s difficulties with the German language and the ensuing unfeasibility of completing an education, her homesickness, their financial worries, her family, who wants more and more money from Lea, and the civil war in Ivory Coast that makes everything and everybody uncertain. The camera is omnipresent: it is shaking in Thümena's hands when he finds out what Lea did with their son during a holiday in Ivory Coast, and he even quarrels with her while the camera keeps rolling. Every obstacle is an ordeal and sometimes things seem to get the better of them – Thomas even says so on one occasion. But their will to fight their misery together is stronger. That is, until they fly into trouble all over again. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)