Eva Trobish widens her lens in Home Stories, a film that moves her work from solitary, inward-facing portraits to a bustling, multi-generational ensemble. Set in the small town of Griez in the former GDR, the story hinges on a deceptively simple premise: a young woman, Lea, is selected for a televised singing competition. That audition becomes a prism through which family secrets, local politics and lingering resentments come sharply into view.
Where Trobish’s earlier films stayed tightly tethered to a single consciousness, Home Stories spreads attention across households, workplaces and public spaces. The result is less psychological sequestration and more social texture: a chorus of voices that together sketch a community’s rhythms and fractures. Scenes slip between kitchens and town halls, personal quarrels and civic meetings, producing a near-novelistic tapestry rather than the focused interiority of her debut features.
That broadened scope gives the film real civic weight. Trobish is preoccupied with how memory, redevelopment and local economies intersect—the ways heritage projects can nurture a place, or be reshaped into commodities. The old weaving factory where Lea’s grandmother worked becomes a recurring emblem: a site of collective labor, a contested artifact of the past, and a flashpoint for debates over who decides what gets preserved. One scene, in which the grandmother recoils at the framing of the factory’s story, captures the film’s central moral knot—preservation can easily slide into sanitization.
Stylistically, Trobish oscillates between tight, observational close-ups and wide compositions that emphasize community patterns. Her editing is brisk, laced with small comic interruptions that give the film energy and prevent it from becoming merely didactic. That quick cadence, however, can also fragment certain character arcs. In a large ensemble some figures bloom briefly and then fade: striking vignettes, but occasionally at the cost of deeper emotional payoff.
Lea remains the film’s emotional anchor. Her audition and subsequent performances—especially a restrained, intimate pop ballad—are among Home Stories’ most affecting moments. Around her, a compact ensemble embodies the town’s varied responses to post-reunification change: a cousin who offers solidarity and shared aspiration; a brother who channels anger about stalled prospects; a mother who wears the uneasy mantle of cultural administrator, intent on reviving a museum and securing jobs. These relationships ground the film’s broader political concerns in lived domestic detail.
Politics in Home Stories is mostly lived rather than preached. Trobish stages redevelopment debates and heritage initiatives as part of everyday life—town meetings, fund-raising dinners, awkward negotiations—so the stakes emerge organically. She does not shy away from darker currents: the uneasy accommodation with far-right elements surfaces when a local hotel agrees to host a heritage convention, a decision that ripples through the town’s social fabric. The film resists one-note judgments, letting small domestic choices reveal larger civic shifts.
There are thematic trade-offs. Expanding the canvas allows Trobish to probe systems—economic decline, cultural commodification, the tension between stewardship and spectacle—but it also diffuses the intense psychological focus that made her earlier films so immediate. Some viewers may find the pace uneven, with scenes that feel underdeveloped or abruptly curtailed. Still, the film’s strongest sequences—intimate testimonies that collide with bureaucratic language—deliver real moral clarity.
Home Stories also reads as a practical meditation on how cinema can engage place. When filmmakers route spending, hire locally and make production decisions that respect context, a film can do more than tell a story: it can generate training, jobs and renewed attention for marginal places. Trobish’s approach suggests a model for socially minded filmmaking that ties narrative ambition to concrete, local outcomes without collapsing the artistic impulse into activism.
Technically, the film trades deep immersion for a mosaic of attitudes. That gives it documentary-like clarity at times—small rituals, archival fragments and communal gatherings feel observed rather than staged—yet some characters never receive the space needed to evolve fully. The editing’s contrast between lightness and gravity is often exhilarating, but occasionally leaves threads unresolved.
Verdict: Home Stories is an ambitious, imperfect enlargement of Trobish’s world. It’s most successful when it lets personal histories illuminate structural change, and when its quieter moments linger beyond the screening. Programmers, cultural funders and filmmakers interested in heritage, community and regional regeneration will find much to discuss here. The film doesn’t solve the tensions it maps between art and civic responsibility, but it poses those questions with intelligence, compassion and a novelist’s appetite for detail.