21/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Ivette Löcker paints a portrait of a couple buckling under the strain of racism and discrimination in Vienna

The positive ring to the title of Ivette Löcker’s documentary Our Time Will Come [+see also:
trailer
film profile] stems more from wishful thinking than from a certainty about the future. In it, the Austrian filmmaker follows a couple – Siaka Touray and Victoria Preuer – for over a year through their fight for stability and the opportunity to build a family in Austria, while Siaka is paperless, a refugee from Gambia facing racism and precarious working conditions. Löcker is there during the couple’s job-centre appointments, family visits and fights – while she very rarely intervenes, the presence of the camera doesn’t go unnoticed in this title, world-premiering in the Forum section of this year’s Berlinale.

In a tense, lengthy sequence in the middle of Our Time Will Come, Siaka and Victoria argue over the content of Löcker’s film; more precisely, they disagree on the things that should be represented. While Siaka reminds her that they said yes to a film “about our story, our pain and our good times”, Victoria voices her worries about not including more of their happy times as a couple. Such a statement may be seen as a concern of pride and vanity, but within the context of the film, it actually reveals a lot about the weight of discrimination and the bureaucratic hell they are forced to negotiate. As refugee stories go, a viewer may think that the couple has it “easier” than others, but of course, there is no measurement of people’s pain. It’s very rare to see a man like Siaka speak so openly about his pain and mental health, torn between his starving family in Gambia and an often-polite society in Vienna that nevertheless keeps him at bay.

Our Time Will Come is a relationship portrait that gets chiselled out slowly and unassumingly. At first, the film doesn’t even try to overcome Siaka and Victoria’s performative presence; it just leaves them be, instead of trying to follow up on the (illusory) “fly on the wall” idea of a documentary. Löcker keeps her distance, but in a respectful way, in order to let the two speak and make what they wish out of every scene, be it intimate or not.

As a result, the film changes halfway through, ever so slowly shifting accordingly, and well enough to accommodate the couple’s own rhythm – one they must have found in conjunction with the camera during the process of shooting. Patience is key when it comes to finding your place and to the filmmaking practice, but it is also a luxury – this takeaway is made palpable by Löcker’s approach and her refusal to take over or narrate the couple’s story in any conventionally “cinematic” ways, because love and freedom are human rights.

Our Time Will Come was produced by Austria’s KGP Filmproduktion, and the film’s world sales are handled by sixpackfilm.