Helga Reidemeister met Irene Rakowitz whilst working as a social worker in a housing estate in North-West Berlin. Irene, politically active within the estate and recently divorced, agreed to collaborate with Reidemeister to document the reality of working-class family lives. Rakowitz herself said, “Family is absolutely taboo, and I don’t think that’s right. It is also a success of my political thinking process, which started somewhere, that I have learned that family just does not have to be taboo! Because everything that becomes visible from the outside in social situations or social behaviour originates in the family. This is the breeding ground of all social behaviour, and I think that precisely where this comes from must be uncovered.” Von wegen ‘Schicksal’ is an attempt at addressing the power structures between filmmaker and filmed, with Rakowitz as an active participant not just in her own life, but in the filmmaking process.

“My main characters are women because in our society women have the greatest difficulty in finding a bit of happiness in their daily lives. But I wouldn’t call my films ‘women’s films’, rather family films. I like to think men can equally learn from them. One-sided learning by women is useless, as far as I’m concerned. I take seriously the viewing habits of the so-called masses in order to reach them. That is public which is consistently deceived and neglected by television because their everyday problems are ignored. I don’t make films for the privileged, for intellectuals, although I don’t exclude them. My main project is to make films for the people who are in them and who recognize themselves in them. Beyond that, I also make films for myself and for my friends. The themes in my most recent films — about the capacity to love, about violence, dreams, and hope — these are not questions specific to any one class. My films also attempt to work out problems which remain unsaid and repressed. They are documents of what isolates me, what makes me angry, what I want to experience so that it will change, so that it won’t stay the way it is.” (Helga Reidemeister)