Daniel Asadi Faezi and Mila Zhluktenko offer a powerful, lucid, and deeply moving essay on memory, structural racism, and the untold history of migration in Germany. Centered around a single physical space—the Olympia shopping mall in Munich—the directors construct a complex reflection on what this building represents for the country: not just a symbol of economic progress and modernity, but also a site of violence, exclusion, and forgetting. Built between 1970 and 1972 by migrant workers—mainly from Turkey, Italy, and the former Yugoslavia—the mall, like many other projects of the time, was raised by foreign hands. Yet the so-called Gastarbeiter were never truly welcomed. The promise of integration was more rhetorical than real, as the painful persistence of racism in the country makes clear. This tension pulses through every corner of the mall, especially after the 2016 attack, in which nine people—all with migrant backgrounds—were murdered in the very place their ancestors helped build.
The film doesn’t limit itself to denunciation but proposes a poetic dialogue between images of the present, archives from the past, and cinematic references such as Addressee Unknown (1983) by Sohrab Shahid Saless. Faezi and Zhluktenko combine archival material, current scenes from the mall, and an experimental soundtrack that deepens the film’s emotional resonance without resorting to overexposure.
What makes In Retrospect so relevant is its ability to weave together history, cinema, and politics through a refined and sensitive aesthetic approach. At a time when the rise of xenophobic parties threatens to rewrite Germany’s present, this short film functions as an act of resistance, confronting what society would rather ignore. The history of migration is not a footnote in German history; it is its backbone. In Retrospect makes this painfully clear, offering a gaze that combines denunciation and compassion, memory and critique.
