Lucy, my mother's sister, emigrated from a little Bavarian village to the United States in 1934. From that date she did not give any more news of herself. Fifty years later I went to New York (with a Bolex camera and a sound recorder) to look for my aunt.

Piece by piece a mosaic of her life emerged from the tales of her best friends - four women between 90 and 100 years old - and from the stories of Lucy, her black adoptive daughter.

Lucy was a gambler through and through, at the New York stock market as well as at the poker games in Harlem. With her woman accompanist on the piano, she travelled to many countries as a singer, she became a dancer on Broadway, she performed in Harlem shows, she was an alcoholic and the owner of a pineapple plantation in Hawaii.

Lucy is a film about the longing for love and freedom. It is a portrait of the women in whose lives Lucy appeared and disappeared and a portrait of the city of New York at night.

- Verena Rudolph