EA girl sits in the sandbox and buries her little brother. At least symbolically. The small toy figure is buried deep in the ground so that no one can find it. The girl’s name is Ronja, she’s six years old and plays in her therapist’s practice. It’s in a large old building in Berlin, with wooden floorboards, full of stuffed animals, toys and a trampoline. Everything is here. Even, at least as far as Ronja is concerned, a good friend. Because the therapist plays along, takes over the voices of the characters and promises to allow the sandpit to be used just as the girl prepared it. Then she promises her that she will always “like her just the same”, no matter what Ronja does.
In the next room, 15-year-old Sam is standing in front of a window and is working on his chewing gum, hood over his head. He is there with his foster mother – against his will. Sam doesn’t feel like playing games or talking. He puts headphones in his ears, tries to block out the room, the therapy, the therapist. He’s waiting.
“Safe” is the first series from director Caroline Link. As usual with Link, it revolves around people and their confused feelings. In the first moments of the series, the viewer does not think of the work of an Oscar winner, but is reminded of an ARTE documentary from the 1980s. Bella Halben’s camera seems to just hold it while a child first puts on make-up and then thinks up detailed stories with figures in the sandpit. Netflix lovers in particular begin to feel strange in the first few minutes, after all they are greedily required to be patient. Something they are no longer used to giving. The therapist and the audience watch Ronja play and go along with everything.
Link, who won an Oscar for her film “Nowhere in Africa”, lets the viewer experience the basic emotional state of therapy sessions: expectations that are confronted with slowness and soon with impatience. Expectations that want to quickly spot a plot twist or at least a plot. But therapy is not a quick art. And it’s not adults who come to therapy with their problems. Link shows the work of child and youth therapists Katinka and Tom. In the series you treat four children who are between five and 16 years old. Her “conspicuous behavior” brings her into practice. They are aggressive, overly distracted, or have anxiety. The patients didn’t choose to be here. Ronja does not go to therapy, but to play. Sam, who has been through several foster families, has to go to therapy if he wants to stay in the current one.
“That’s education, we don’t do that”
The approach that Link portrays is play therapy. The children are accompanied without suggesting any other behavior. They should build up trust in the therapists while playing and thus become clear about their feelings. Cognitive psychotherapy with young people is also not about a depth psychological analysis, but about creating a space in which they can feel safe and think. In order to portray this as authentically as possible, the scenes were created in cooperation with therapists, who were also allowed to intervene in the dialogues: “A therapist wouldn’t say that now, that’s education, we don’t do that,” says Link, describing the consultations.
The children and young people are accompanied in eight sessions over eight episodes – each for 45 minutes. Link tells the patients’ stories as calmly as the therapists listen to them. Whether they want a bottle one minute and are screaming and throwing clothes across the room the next. The mantra for both the show and the therapist: “Don’t get impatient.” Or, as one therapist on the show puts it, “Beets don’t grow faster when you pull on them.”
The balancing act between the closeness that the therapists are trying to establish and the professional distance that they have to maintain is cleverly conveyed by the camera. She keeps a healthy distance from the patients, but follows them, along with the therapists, from one venue to the next. Stand next to her, listen. Close-ups of faces and hands are used subtly by Link and Halben. When Ronja talks about how she is sometimes very afraid, the camera moves cautiously, almost caressing her face.
With “Safe” Link has written a declaration of love to children and young people. She herself says: “I feel very connected to children. What moved me in this form of therapy is the attitude with which one looks at childhood. It’s not about their behavior, it’s not about their behavior, they are not corrected, corrected, educated. It’s about them building a trusting relationship with the therapist and being able to be who they are.” The series is therefore also an appeal to create more space for therapy. In “Safe” it is patience and understanding that lead to solutions. With a view to the lack of therapy places, however, one can become impatient in Germany.
“Safe” will be on “ZDFneo” from November 8th, every Tuesday at 8:15 p.m