Augsburg, 1982. Fourteen-year-old Alex and his best friend Heinz have an old Soviet Lomo Super 8 camera, a few rolls of Kodachrome, and a plan: they are going to make a movie. Not a school project. Not a home movie. A real film. Their hero is Werner Lutz, an Augsburg secret agent.
There will be villains, bicycle chases, mysterious strangers, explosions, disguises, and a final showdown. The boys write scenes, invent characters, find locations, recruit friends, build props, and learn filmmaking by simply doing it. Money is a problem, of course. Film stock costs money. So they collect coins, make deals, accept help from unexpected people — and eventually discover that filmmaking can test the boundaries between imagination and reality.
Their movie becomes a portrait of the world they inhabit: early-1980s Augsburg, with its swimming pools, dance schools, American soldiers, German-American festivals, cinemas, apartment blocks, schoolyards, bicycles and quiet streets. It is a world on the edge between childhood and adulthood, captured frame by frame through a Soviet camera that has already travelled a remarkable distance.
Because the Lomo has its own story. Alex received it from his father in Riga in 1977, shortly before his family left the Soviet Union. For years it lay unused, wrapped in an old shirt in an Augsburg attic. Now, in the summer of 1982, it begins to record Alex's new life in Germany. The film they make, Werner Lutz, is imperfect, improvised and wonderfully ambitious. It is screened, remembered, discussed — and never completely finished.
Forty-four years later, Alex and Heinz are still friends. They meet regularly on a bench beside the Lech, near the railway bridge. They are both fifty-eight now. The Augsburg of their youth has changed. People they knew are gone. Buildings have disappeared or become ruins. The boys themselves have grown old.
But the Lomo is still there. So are the film rolls. So are Heinz's handwritten index cards. And somewhere inside those fragments is the summer of 1982 — preserved not as a perfect memory, but as a collection of images, sounds, mistakes, jokes, friendships, disappointments, and moments that neither of them knew would become important.
SUPER 8 SUMMER is a personal and bittersweet novel about friendship, filmmaking, migration, family, growing up and the stubborn persistence of memory. It is about two boys who decide to make a movie and discover, almost without noticing, that they are also documenting their own lives. And it is about what happens to a story when the people who created it grow older.
Some films are never finished. Some friendships are. And some stories remain alive precisely because nobody ever managed to put an end to them.
