Dear Armgard and Max,

Writing this present letter to you has a strange flavour to me for I feel I am working at the same time. As you both know I still have to do my completion year at the Filmakademie. I am making my graduation film this year.
I was a long time indecisive and unable to use this chance to choose the kind of picture I want to shoot. The role of eroticism, love or sexuality in my friends’ lives has become a personal topic of mine.
I thought of the both of you: we were for years a close trio of friends and had no steady relationships, which was an odd thing in our environment. I think that gave us the privilege of gaining our own perspective on those subjects. This position is our asset.
I would like with this letter to ask you if you are interested in joining in. Please make up your mind for it only if you really feel like it as I think we’d all take a false start if you just did it for Lili’s sake. I’ll sure be delighted if you show as much interest as we do. I needn’t mention that I will perfectly accept a refusal but let me mention it all the same.
As a way of making your decision easier I shall try to describe my ideas, fears and hopes about this project. All this is not very palpable yet since we’re still in the early stages. The movie’s topic is more definite than its form.
I fear first of all to jeopardize our friendship as working on this film will certainly modify our relationship. I am ready to take that risk for I don’t believe in friendship as a given fact. It is an opportunity for us to gain insight into our position or to come closer. This will require from us the right amount of confidence and will raise the ever recurrent question of really wishing to take part in a film that deals with private matters.

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I believe that working on a movie helps me push my boundaries. For instance when in a documentary film exercise I recorded a conversation between Anja Gehri and myself the presence of the camera helped me put her questions that I had never cared to ask before.
I think that a condition for this film should be the courage to open up oneself. Everyone may consider what they can avail themselves of it.
Let us now get more precise about facts, time exposure and suchlike: I would pester you for about a month with my camera and another cameraman’s. You would go on leading your accustomed life while I should stand thereby with my camera. Obviously that ordinary life of yours will be modified by the presence of the camera and the induced reflection. We would cause certain situations to happen just for the sake of the camera.
Then again I could fancy to set up a meeting between the both of you.
I could imagine e.g. to contrast your relationship with a typical love scene from a commercial movie with stereotypical camera angles. The film “Komm in den Garten” released in 1990 by Heinz Brinkmann and Jürgen Wisotzky is something of a forerunner model to me. It shows three friends in the late GDR and is shaped as follows: “eluding voyeurism the authors offer the portrayed persons situations to invent and reshape playfully. Alfred, Dieter und Michael tell of their lives, cook for one another, weep and play at times along with the film over themselves.” Heinz Brinkmann: „Our film is about why those three are friends.”
I look forward to your response or even to questions and hope I was clear enough, Take care

Lilian