Tisa is a German writer and filmmaker. Born in 1983 near Frankfurt, she started studying Directing at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) in 2006. She has since produced, written and directed multiple short films. She completed her debut feature Prince in 2021, which premiered in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. It tells the complicated love story and the social repercussions of the very intense romance between a white German woman and a Congolese immigrant.

This interview was conducted in December 2024 as part of ArteKino 2024. Prince is available to watch online for free during the entire month – just click here for more information.

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Susanne Gottlieb – This is your feature film debut. How long have you been carrying this story with you and how has it changed over time?

Lisa Bierwirth – The starting point was my mother Susanne’s relationship with her then-husband Erick, who’s from Kinshasa, Congo. Despite all the problems, they were a great, dazzling couple – not only in their differences, but also in their resilience, humour and interpersonal dynamics. They had the impulse and self-confidence to narrate such a relationship in the first place. I must admit that, at the beginning of their relationship, I too was skeptical and wondered if this could end well or whether their “differences” weren’t too much to handle. But I gradually understood the strength and courage it takes to live out a love that isn’t granted the same chances, that’s eyed with suspicion while still maintaining its closeness and intimacy.

From there – I think this was in 2009 – I started intense research and held a lot of conversations to find out what exactly, and more particularly how, one might narrate the challenges of such a partnership. Especially because I was intent on not telling my mother’s story. So if you ask for her experience, you need to talk to her since I do believe it’s rather private, and Prince is a fictional piece.

SG – How has it changed over time?

LB – I considered at the outset the obvious struggles and multi-faceted external pressures that weighed on their relationship – the need to comply with official requirements, the ever-present threat of police checks, and with them the fear of deportation.

At the same time, I felt that my focus was something other than the horror of how difficult it is to get a foothold as an asylum seeker in Germany, or of describing which forms of structural racism are all-pervasive. I was much more interested in the personal struggle between Susanne and Erick. It seemed incredibly complex and challenging. By degrees, I understood that it wasn’t solely rooted in their divergent cultural backgrounds, social environments or origins. My co-author Hannes Held and I then considered the interplay and internal pressure within such a relationship: A woman from the “prosperous welfare state of Germany” meets a Congolese man, whose previous experience doesn’t include a “functioning state”, who has a completely different paradigm of what it takes to survive. And whose parameters of right and wrong, what’s punishable and what’s not, differ from Monika’s concept of a law-governed state.

While developing the script, we above all tried to understand whether – and if so, then how and where – social and political conditions, and therefore postcolonial structures and conflicts, in particular, are also reflected in the private sphere; to what extent the unequal and unresolved relationships between the so-called “first” and “third worlds”, of Europe to Africa and vice versa, are reflected; which perpetrator-victim assignations are concomitant with this and what mistrust can result from it; also the question of how such mistrust becomes antagonistic to a loving relationship.

Monika believes she’s different from her friends and everyone else. She believes she doesn’t share their mistrust. But she’s then forced to conclude that she isn’t free of it either, as a child of her generation and this society. Via Joseph, she’s confronted with something she knows in theory and has reflected upon. In the reality of daily life, this relationship places entirely different demands on her and forces her to examine herself time and again. Which brings her to the limits of her love, too.

Joseph brings this mistrust to the relationship from the offset; to him, it’s a kind of survival strategy based on experience. He’s absolutely determined not to let himself be controlled by anything or anyone. This includes not revealing everything about himself and showing little vulnerability – which is one reason he’s sometimes unforthcoming. When he says, “my father was colonised, I am not”, it reflects his need for respect and self-determination. Yet sometimes this need also prevents him from having an unbiased and open view. From one moment to the next, Monika ceases to be his partner and turns into “a European,” the enemy personified.

SG – You were at one point nominated by the German Screenplay Award for Best Unfilmed Screenplay, did that help in the development?

LB – When the script was nominated for the Award, if I remember correctly, we had already received quite some funding. But I believe that it certainly helped with further funding and development of the project. I was lucky to have a Komplizen Film as a production company, they mostly dealt with these questions.

SG – Your cast is includes big German stars, such as Ursula Strauss, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, or Hanns Zischler. Was this a challenge?

LB – A challenge to work with them or to win them over for the project? I was very lucky that many of the actresses and actors to whom I or the casting directors sent the script wanted to take part. The challenge was to put together the large ensemble, and also the combination of non-professional and professional actors. Working with these Austrian and German stars, was a rather good experience, as the work naturally benefits from their many years of experience and expertise.

It was Ursula Strauss who brought Monika to life, who gave the character her authenticity. I thought of her very early on. Although I cast a few other actresses, I quickly realised that it had to be her. Ursula has a great way of showing weaknesses without losing her strength or betraying herself. I was very touched by this permeability. We rehearsed a lot and Ursula really put all her energy, passion and experience into the film. It was a great collaboration for which I am very grateful.

SG – The film had its premiere in Karlovy Vary and has accumulated several award nominations across the world, winning the German Film Critics Award for Ursula Strauss. Is this reaction overwhelming, and how does it set the bar for your next work?

LB – It was great that Prince in the end was able to make this journey and that it also received some recognition. That wasn’t given at the time because we premiered in the middle of the pandemic and it was very difficult for a lot of films, also for mine. Other than that, I try not to set the bar too high because I think it can, and certainly sometimes does, stop you from working. How a film turns out and whether it turns out well depends on so many factors. I try to stay with myself whenever possible, concentrate on my work and then try to do my best on the next project.

SG – Some say love is love, no matter the differences. Your movie focuses on decolonisation, societal hierarchies, naivety, and poor communication. Are we too optimistic about the idea of being able to love everyone?

LB – For Prince we favoured melodrama as an exaggerated emotional narrative in order to keep the film from getting bogged down in social realism. It allowed us to narrate how the “loving couple” falls victim to conditions that are beyond their control and bigger than they are. Our script consultant Petra Lüschow put it beautifully: Monika and Joseph are two royal children who can’t be together because the waters are too deep.

SG – The film questions the romantic notion that love can conquer all boundaries and invalidate social conventions. One might instead ask whether being able to live out one’s love isn’t a luxury. Or even whether one even means the same thing when one talks about love.

LB – We personally never questioned that Monika and Joseph really do love each other – that was the basic premise. They experience something like love at first sight, albeit behind a garbage can, to no fanfare, and without the Titanic orchestra in the background. I was often asked during the writing phase why they fall in love at all, and if Monika doesn’t need a reason to fall in love with this “shifty, inscrutable Congolese guy”. It’s fascinating how we naturally accept Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant falling in love after a raid, but the same doesn’t go for Monika and Joseph.

SG – You have a white woman and a black man and yet white male heteronormativity seems to be obstacle within this relationship. She feels obliged to be a white saviour, he wants to prove he is equal to his Caucasian surroundings. Is this “whitening” inescapable? As shady as Joseph’s business is, Monika’s aim to become a yes-woman, a footman in the art scene is equally questionable. Your personal experience with the art sector?

LB – I am not sure if I understand the question correctly, or if I see it the same way. To me, they’re heroes because they’re audacious, be it in their private or professional lives, while their respective environments are much more rigid and inflexible. Monika and Joseph really get things swinging. You could claim that, in the classical sense, they fail. He ends up in construction despite his every wish to the contrary, and she doesn’t get the job. And over and above that, their relationship doesn’t survive.

SG – It’s important to ask what conditions and mechanisms are at play here. Why, for example, doesn’t Monika get the job, and what is it about Peter that allows him to have a career? What’s the reason for their relationship failing to survive? And what does that in turn tell us about the society in which we live?

LB – Well, I always viewed Monika and Joseph as “lone wolves”, a condition or feeling that unites them. He may be an asylum seeker, but he won’t accept the claustrophobic space assigned him in Germany. Joseph is evidently stigmatised and marginalised, with nothing left but to go it alone. And Monika, too, recognises that things are getting tight and lonely in the field society affords her as a childless woman in her mid-40s without a spectacular career – she indeed gets sympathy for this. She herself suddenly has the sensation of vanishing.

The great thing is that the two of them don’t let it get them down, even if they do shed some feathers. If in the end they can embrace and meet as equals in all their fragility and sincere mutual care, their eyes unaverted, then they’re somehow victorious!

Concerning Monika and the art scene I find it hard to retrace how she became who she is now. It’s an amalgamation of many elements, a long process from the first notes to the final cut in which her character continued to emerge and detach itself from my mother. Naturally, this included a sociological study of Monika, her origins and goals. Her complexity grows from the character traits that stand in her way and from the female role models I know and admire, as well as from situations and encounters that we wanted to relate. So there’s certainly a little of Hannes and me in Monika, too.

Choosing the milieu of the art world was a way to broach the narrative with a terrain that’s familiar to me personally before venturing from there onto an unfamiliar field of play, that of the Congolese diaspora. There was nevertheless a lot of research involved in scripting Monika’s profession. To recreate an authentic guided art tour, for example, we needed input from experienced curators and exhibition organisers. It was important to us for Monika to be a woman from the “normal” art business, the kind people like to portray as all champagne, cocaine and jet-set. That’s an oversimplification that really misses the point.

Another reason for placing Monika in the art scene was because the intellectual debate conducted there considers itself elevated above accusations of injustice. We sought the challenge to look for everyday racism precisely where one doesn’t immediately suspect or expect it – i.e., beyond the common cliches.

We did, however, have to look in the mirror at times while writing.

SG – One of the strongest aspects of your film is that the Congolese/African characters are never fetishised. How did you research about them?

LB – The husband of my mother was on board immediately when I told him about the idea and he agreed to do all the interviews. So the character of Joseph had a clear model, yet at the same time required profound research for more details. Time and again, we ran into situations, behaviour and questions that we couldn’t decrypt, but which at the same time – or indeed because of that – interested us as they opened a vista on the aforementioned questions regarding the relationship between Africa and Europe.

The biggest challenge was to narrate a perspective that isn’t and cannot become mine. With his character and others, I entered very unfamiliar territory, the Congolese, Camaroonian and Angolan diasporas. The question as to whether I could do the perspective justice at all gave me the odd sleepless night. I interviewed a lot of people from the African diaspora, especially Congolese and Angolans, read a lot and constantly cross-referenced fiction with reality. So I was in constant consultation with close research partners.

SG – The disreputable Frankfurt train station quarter is a main film character. Why did you such Frankfurt and such location?

LB – Frankfurt am Main is great as the location, because opposites collide here in all their relentlessness. Frankfurt is home to the European Central Bank, one of the largest stock exchanges in the world, and innumerable international corporations. It’s a city where global makers and shakers meet, and it’s a part of Joseph’s imagination. The money is palpable and at the same time exudes exclusion. The banking district borders on the Bahnhofsviertel, or train station district where sex workers, artists, drug addicts, tourists, business people, and a multitude of folks from around the world meet every day. It seems to follow its own rules and codes and is like a super small-scale New York. The shadow economy is tangible and there are regular raids for narcotics, weapons and illegal immigrants – while not far away the solid suburbs and semi-detached houses with geraniums reside. This collision of winners and losers, cosmopolitan city and German bourgeoisie, of poverty and wealth, was a most fitting and inspiring court for the film to play in.

SG – Please tell us more about your upcoming projects.

LB – Over the last year I was very busy with the new film by Valeska Grisebach, for which I am co-author. In the summer I also accompanied the filming for four months in Bulgaria. I just returned a couple of weeks ago. The film is now in the editing stage. Now I’m turning my attention back to my next project, which I’ve been researching for a while.

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Lisa Bierwirth is pictured at the top of this article. The other image is a still from Prince.