Of Love and Death

BR / HFF / FFF, 2016, 85 minutes

After an automobile accident that wasn’t his fault, in 2008, Robert Wolf is paralyzed from the neck down. For six years, right up to his death, Katrin Nemec accompanies the once successful guitarist of the band Quadro Nuevo, and his wife, Angelika. 

It’s a life of dependency, without being able to make music himself – a life that Robert Wolf increasingly feels he does not wish to live. Meanwhile, his young wife makes every attempt to build a life with him. Finally, in autumn 2014, Robert decides to arrange a self-determined death.

The quiet, poetic scenes of this documentary film show the couple’s divergent development, casting a differentiated light on the topic of assisted suicide. We see a young woman who wants a lot from life and cannot understand how her husband can decide against life and thus against her. On the other side is a man who has to endure the daily pain and indignity and who wants to decide for himself to end it all.

Of Love and Death is Katrin Nemec’s graduation film at the University for Television and Film Munich.