THE COLOUR OF YEARNING

Qatar, Portugal, Mexico, Japan and Germany - those are the countries in which renowned German director and cameraman Thomas Riedelsheimer is looking for „The Colour of Yearning“. With striking images, music, poems and eight touching stories about love, home, hope, nature and freedom this film talks about the tragedy but also the bliss of being human.

At  forty years of age, Layla, in Doha Qatar wants finally to start feeling alive. She wants to throw off her clothes, wants to feel, smell, touch, to let her hair free in the sun and the wind and she wants to get a tattoo - a red butterfly. All this as a Muslim woman in a sparkling, rather surreal city between desert and sea.

Dona Mingas, fifty, lives in Cova da Moura, an immigrant  neighborhood of  Lisbon. At nineteen she left Cabo Verde. Two daughters, the younger one just nine months old, stayed behind. Mingas is happy with her life but one day she wants to return home. She is quite different from Tazy who was born in the neighborhood that he calls his Ghetto. It is his life and he does not at all want to leave this place although he is not regarded as Portuguese but „black“.  And the ghetto is a difficult place.

Julius has just finished Highschool in Munich. A sensitive young man, with a spirit and attitude fashionable in the German Romatic period, Julius suffers with the world and wants to make it a better place - with his music. He is having a hard time finding his place in society.

 Tada-San lives in Kamagasaki, a part of the high-tech world of Osaka, crowded with homeless people. Thousands live here, on the edge of a society that no longer has need of them. But Tada fights his condition with poems that he writes in workshops held by Kanayo Ueda. This petite, charming lady runs the „Cococroom“ a coffeeshop for the poor and the lost. She truly believes in the power of words and tries to give people back their own voices.

„I belong to the sea“ says Alfredo, a Cuban diver and cameraman, who lives in La Paz, Mexico. Above all he loves the sea and all its creatures and the togetherness he feels in the silent vastness of the world under the surface. But now his great love has a competitor: After years of suffering from an unrequited love he has now found Liisa - and he loves her with all his passion, 72 hours a day.

Talk to them, listen to them, prevent them jumping off the cliff. Former policeman Shige-San could not stand the Japanese attitude of just ignoring the high suicide rate and made it his job to do something about it and patrol the cliffs of Tojinbo. Apparently no one else sees the despair and yearning in those who go there to kill themselves.