‘Smell Of Burnt Milk’: Munich Review

Dir/scr: Justine Bauer. Germany. 2024. 78mins

The declining fortunes of Germany’s family-run farms provide an elegiac backdrop to Justine Bauer’s graduation work and first feature Smell Of Burnt Milk. Bauer’s keen eye and clear affinity with the subject mark her out as a fresh voice, and the modest film may attract some attention from festivals championing new talent. While it may be too slight for commercial exposure, Bauer’s assured storytelling and sense of place leave you keen to discover what she does next.

Bauer reveals a distinctive voice

Unfolding over a summer of subtle shifts and changes, Smell Of Burnt Milk finds its central focus in Katinka (Karolin Nothacker), a young woman eager to continue the family tradition of farming. Accomplished at everything from harvesting hay and driving a tractor to milking cows and castrating a llama, Katinka has all the qualities that should allow her to follow in the footsteps of her mother (Johanna Wokalek) and grandmother Emma (Lore Bauer). Grandma’s memories of quinces hanging from the trees and fields ploughed by horses rather than machines adds a note of nostalgia to the story. The times are no longer favourable for such family ventures and there is a question mark hanging over the financial viability of the business. Katinka is frequently advised to have a plan B.

Woven throughout the film are moments that testify to the parlous state of agriculture and the challenges to Katinka’s ambitions. At one point, she visits a housing development where all traces of its previous life as a farm have been erased. A neighbour plants green crosses on his land to mark the closing of other farms and tries to alert an indifferent world to the plight of the small farmer. Eventually, he sets fire to a bale of hay, dousing the flames with worthless, unprofitable  milk – an act which provides the film with its title.

Katinka’s sister Anna (Bullinger) is pregnant and the big decisions facing the two woman provide the human face of the story. There is a underlying theme that many of the challenges are caused by useless men, from Anna’s pregnancy to the way that primogeniture will block Katinka inheriting the farm she loves and is most qualified to run. Both women are slightly obsessed with castration and how it serves to calm the male animals.

Smell Of Burnt Milk has clearly been a labour of love for Bauer. Her biography reveals that she was raised on an ostrich farm and many Bauer family members are listed among the cast and crew credits – even her dog has been roped in. You can feel that commitment in the thoughtfulness of her unsentimental approach and in the decision to use a local dialect for the dialogue. Bauer captures a sense of a languid, unhurried rural summer where time moves on but some things remain constant, including the demands of the season. The backbreaking work of harvest and ‘castration day’ is balanced by playing in the hazy fields, gorging on grandma’s bumper crop of juicy tomatoes or spending afternoons at the nearby river floating lazily downstream on a giant inflatable.

The farming backdrop invites comparisons with Hope Dickson Leach’s debut feature The Levelling (2016) but Bauer reveals a distinctive voice in her pacing, composition, use of wistful narration and framing of the farming family in groups, generations and individual portraits. She is also driven to offbeat images, from a clump of snails clinging to a leg to Katinka milking in her prized green bikini top and boots.