It takes only a few seconds — the first notes ring out, you look into the pain- and grief-stricken face of a young girl holding her dying father in her arms, and the union of song and image develops a poetry so painfully beautiful that it never lets you go. It is the first music video by the a cappella group Niniwe from Berlin. The four women write their music themselves and can thus give it precisely the voices that make their sound so unique. Clear and multifaceted, with an intensity that is moving. For the single "Branches", director Dennis Charly Bergande found a story and visual language that carry this intensity over into film as well. "While filming I first thought they would have to write a new song for our film, because the story seemed too dark for the piece," Jörg Westphal recalls. He plays a middle-aged man who is released from prison after a long sentence and calls his daughter, who has since come of age. They finally want to see each other again, but as she is already running towards him, the demons of the past catch up with him and he is stabbed from behind. He dies in his daughter's arms.
When Jörg Westphal sees the finished music video, however, he is thrilled with the work. For even though the song's lyrics do not tell the story this way, the music fits the images breathtakingly well. "I thought it was particularly great that they did not choose the classic, clichéd images that would, of course, also suit the mood of the music," recounts Jörg Westphal. And so a music video has come into being that resonates for a long time afterwards.