Ohne Bewährung - Psychogramm einer Mörderin

In 1993, filmmaker Aelrun Goette became acquainted with the then 17-year-old Jeannette S. in women‘s penitentiary Plötzensee in Berlin. At the age of fifteen, Jeannette and three other children fatally wounded the 13-year-old Melanie H., who died later on in hospital. This murder is still known as one of the most gruesome crimes in contemporary German criminal justice. After Goette and Jeannette had made the film EINE (1994) together, a video letter from the convict to her parents, with whom she had hardly any contact, the plan originated at the end of 1996 to capture the first steps of Jeannette‘s rehabilitation on film. The film consists of extensive testimonies by Jeannette at different stages of her prison term. Most striking is the almost emotionless way in which she unfolds the details of her crime. Even after five years in jail she has to admit that she still does not exactly know what had come over her at the time of the crime.