KENEDI GOES BACK HOME

Belgrade airport, in the fall of 2002: Every day, Kenedi meets people who have been deported from Germany – just like him. The young man who makes ends meet as a cabdriver and lives in his car, is the intermediary between the crew of this semi-documentary and the deported, who have not yet dealt with the shock of their involuntary return. After living in Germany for ten years, they were woken by the police in the middle of the night, torn from their jobs and schools. They have lost everything. Arriving in the former Yugoslavia, they are again faced with a void – just like it was when they immigrated to Germany. Like Kenedi, most of them belong to the Roma minority; with his help they are now looking for their houses which were often destroyed during the war or are now occupied by someone else. Especially the children who speak only German and not a word of Serbian feel displaced in their former native country; Teenagers with a Swabian accent, who live in rundown barracks and don’t have the money to go to school, turn to the camera to say hello to their German schoolmates. Johnny, too, drives with Kenedi through the villages in order to find his family that had been deported before him. Visiting Belgrade’s Goethe-Institute, he gets little encouragement for a return to Germany. An unusual view from outside of the European borders about the daily fate of refugees and the actual consequences of political decisions and bureaucratic proceedings.