IM PRINZIP FAMILIE – Or: What Happens When Love Is a Shift Schedule

Daniel Abma, born in 1978 in Westerbork in the Netherlands, came to film by detour. He first studied primary school pedagogy, worked as a media educator in Berlin, before studying film direction at Filmuniversität Babelsberg. His pedagogical background is not a biographical footnote — it is the foundation of his method. Abma knows how to approach children without pressuring them. He knows what a classroom is, a youth welfare office, a report that has to be written in the evening when the children are asleep. This film was not shot by someone discovering an unfamiliar world. It was shot by someone making a familiar world visible.

His debut Nach Wriezen (2012), a long-term observation of young people after their release from juvenile prison, was awarded the Grimme Prize. Transit Havanna (2016) accompanied transgender people in Cuba. Autobahn (2019) told the story of the dispute over a bypass road in East Westphalia. Each of these films is protagonist-centred, observational, social — and each refuses to offer solutions. Abma shows conditions, not theses.

Im Prinzip Familie is the distillation of this method. The more than forty shooting days are spread across a year, always with the same team: Abma, director of photography Johannes Praus, sound recordist Alexandra Praet. The continuity of the crew is not a luxury but a prerequisite: an observational documentary with children only works if the children forget that a camera is there. Or rather: if they no longer perceive it as an intruder but as part of the house.

Praus, who received the Deutscher Kamerapreis 2025 for his work on the film, achieves this by establishing proximity without violating intimacy. His images are warm, at times almost fictional in their composition — and they always preserve the distance that respect for their subjects demands.

There is a scene that distils the principle of the film. In a team meeting the caregivers mention a mother who in the morning cannot manage to get up for her new job and has to be woken by a neighbour. Abma could raise his finger here. He could supply context, statistics, bring in an expert. He does none of it. The scene stays in the room where it takes place — at the table of the residential group, between shift schedules and cold coffee. The mother is not in the picture. She is a sentence in a report, and that is exactly how the caregivers learn of her: as information that has to be processed before the next one comes.

The shift reports themselves — filmed as Antje, Max or Sören type them up after hours — form a layer of their own. They are the language of the institution: sober, formalised, factual. And they are the contrast to what we have just seen: a dinner during which a boy laughs for the first time after going silent for days. The film does not edit these layers against each other. It places them next to each other and lets the viewer feel the gap between what is lived and what is documented.

Bandenfilm — producers Britta Strampe and Laura Klippel — realised the film in co-production with RBB and Arte. It is a constellation typical of German documentary: public broadcasters as co-producers, regional and national film funding as financing pillars. What distinguishes Im Prinzip Familie from many productions of this kind is the time the project was granted. Abma first visited the house in 2018, introduced by a social worker he had met at a discussion of Nach Wriezen. Between that first visit and the cinema release in June 2025 lie seven years. Seven years in which trust was built, ethical questions negotiated, and dramaturgical decisions made that cannot be solved on the editing table, but only in dialogue with the participants.

The questions of anonymisation that Abma and his team confronted from the beginning are, in a film about children in youth welfare, not a marginal note but a fundamental decision. All the children are referred to by first name only. Their surnames never appear. The location of the residential group is kept unknown, references have been digitally removed. These are measures that seem to constrain the film at first — no sign at the gate, no Facebook profile to cross-check — and in fact liberate it. Because through this anonymisation Im Prinzip Familie stops being a film about these specific children and becomes a film about the principle the title names: that family is not bound to blood. That it can be produced — temporary, professional, and still real.

Since its premiere at DOK Leipzig in October 2024 the film has had a remarkable journey: the ver.di Prize for Solidarity, Humanity and Fairness, the Perception Change Award of the United Nations, the Main Prize of the German Documentary Film Award 2025, the Deutscher Kamerapreis for Johannes Praus. And now the Lola nomination. In the Best Documentary category it competes with Sabine Lidl's Siri Hustvedt – Dance Around the Self and Julian Vogel and Johannes Büttner's Soldaten des Lichts. It is a category that traditionally receives less attention at the Lola ceremony than the feature film categories — and for precisely that reason it matters, because it shows the range that German cinema covers.

Im Prinzip Familie does not need spectacular images or a formal experiment to convince. The film works because it does what documentary cinema does at its best: it makes visible what is there and not seen. The work of child and youth welfare, officially recognised as systemically relevant since the pandemic, remains largely invisible — and not only in cinema. Abma does not change that by uncovering a scandal or demanding a reform. He changes it by placing a camera in a house and waiting until life happens. That sounds simple. It is the hardest thing documentary can do.

The question the film poses without formulating it reaches beyond its subject: what do we owe the children who are not born into functioning families? And who pays the price for that question being asked so rarely? Abma's answer is not a programme. It is an image: a caregiver clears away the shards. Puts a new plate down. And carries on.