PARIS – No day without you

Almost 40 years ago, director Ulrike Schaz went to a party in Paris that was also attended by the international terrorist Carlos, who had just shot and killed two agents of the French secret service. At the time, she didn't even know who Carlos was – nevertheless, due to this coincidence she suddenly found herself in the sights of the international fight against terrorism, where she remained for decades to come.

1975 in Paris: out of the blue at a party, the German art student Ulrike Schaz and her French friend are arrested. Three people, including two French secret service officials, had just been shot dead not far from the get-together. Ulrike is at the wrong place at the wrong time, and becomes a target of the international fight against terrorism. She is labelled a terrorist, as well as an accomplice of Carlos the Jackal – in some press reports, even his girlfriend. After all, according to the harebrained logic of the state security, how could anyone be named "Ulrike" and not be one of the Baader-Meinhof Gang? In the city of her dreams, she experiences the nightmare of her life. She is expelled from France, harassed by German officials, and from that day onwards (despite complex and lengthy legal clarification and the official deletion of her data) is considered a person of suspicion who is subjected to the most detailed of examinations every time she ever crosses a border.

In PARIS – NO DAY WITHOUT YOU, Ulrike Schaz attempts a poetic inventory of her own existence. She returns to Paris and meets numerous friends from back then. In addition to extensive conversations with former companions, she builds a silhouette theatre, works with drawn memories to recreate certain events, and uses abstract sound-and-image collages to uncover the vestiges of a time that she – as subject and object – lived, loved, and suffered through.

A continuous double movement pervades the film: the self- and externally determined aspects of the personal biography are detached from the anchor of history – i.e., isolated and analysed in order to synthesise them (enriched, to an extent) back into the big picture of the events of history.

PARIS – NO DAY WITHOUT YOU offers a multifaceted view of the times when states and intelligence agencies were just beginning to store information in databases to combat international terrorism.