FATHERLESS: A Story Based on Fact.

T. is seventeen years old when his father, a respected doctor in a small Southern German town, takes his own life in 1971. He does not die alone; a younger mistress is with him. A family trauma - and a public scandal.

The world of the established family crumbles. Left behind are two adolescents, a forty-year-old widow, and the old mother, who tends the grave and begins to drink.

It takes many decades for T. to face the facts and tell the story of his father’s suicide, how it came to pass, and what followed - a powerful account revolving around existential questions: What is home, what is family? What defines a life? What separates freedom from irresponsibility, and what role does society play in the provinces?

The personal fate simultaneously reveals the history of German mentality over the last fifty years. Thomas Medicus tells a moving and powerful story of a childhood and youth in the 1950s and 1960s and the time thereafter, of a trauma that shaped his life. A deep look into the German soul mirror - and a stirring, personal story.