Alexander the Little

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Movie
Original title Alexander the Little
( Александр маленький )
Country of production GDR
USSR
original language German ,
Russian
Publishing year 1982
length 98 minutes
Rod
Director Vladimir Fokin
script Valentin Jeschow
Wladimir Jeschow
Wladimir Fokin
Ingeburg Kretzschmar
production DEFA , KAG “Berlin”
Gorki-Filmstudios , Moscow
music Eduard Artemjew
camera Sergei Filippov
cut Tamara Belyayeva
occupation

Alexander the Little ( Александр маленький , Alexander malenki) is a German-Soviet co-production by DEFA and the Gorky Film Studios , Moscow by Vladimir Fokin from 1982.

action

The film begins with documentary excerpts that are intended to point to the brutality during the Nazi era . The following pictures show the military battles in a German city ​​which, with the victory of the Red Army, mean the end of World War II .

The 12-year-old Irmgard walks with her brother Peter through the destroyed streets of this city and queues at a goulash cannon set up in front of the Soviet headquarters to get something to eat for herself and her brother. When she received nothing more, she received a piece of bread and some bacon from the Starschina of the Red Army Christschanowitsch, who was waiting nearby . The new superior, Captain Swetow, is interested in the siblings and learns that both are refugees who are on their way to Berlin , where they suspect uncle and aunt. Peter is hostile towards the captain, as his father was shot during the war in the Soviet Union and his mother had to be buried on the roadside during the escape. Nevertheless, the officer offers the two children to take them to Berlin, as he has just been transferred there to work on the editorial team of the German-language newspaper Daily Rundschau as a linguist. When they arrived in Berlin, they found that Irmgard and Peter's relatives' house was no longer there.

Captain Swetow is to take on a leading position in the editorial office in the future, but receives an order from his superior to go to the village of Blankenhain beforehand. The incumbent mayor Huebner, a former concentration camp prisoner , had turned to the editorial staff because he needed help for a makeshift home for orphaned children in his place. Tessa, a German employee of the newspaper, is driving with the captain, his driver and the Starschina. In Blankenhain they are welcomed by some of the children, with an older boy nicknamed Brush representing himself as a supporter of fascist ideas who has gathered several supporters around him. The mayor explains his problems, the main one being the lack of everything. The approximately 50 children are housed in an abandoned barn and the number is increasing every day, some of whom are already suffering from typhus . A baby that was found on the street is just being brought. Since every child has to have a name, after a long discussion it is named after its finder Alexander, so that from now on there is Alexander the Great and the baby Alexander the little in the home. In the meantime, Brush and his friends beat up the refugee boy Peter and appropriated his boots. While the food is being distributed, he bullies the other children and begins another argument with the Russians, which culminates in the fact that he aims a pistol at Captain Svetov, who is able to clear the situation.

Tessa photographs all the children so that the pictures can be published in the newspaper, and then drives a Red Army jeep that happens to pass by to Berlin to get further help. But the soldiers who stayed behind are not idle either, because they buy shoes for the children from a shoe manufacturer. Before that, they get a large farmer to donate three pigs, which are immediately processed. For the feast, Brush wants to add some smoked fish that he has hidden in the nearby forest. Here he meets several members of the werewolf movement, to whom he reveals that there are three Russians in the village. In the midst of the joy of the good food and the shoes that they brought with them, the partying company is attacked by the marauding gang, which kills several children, the Russian driver and Starschina. Brush, who now realizes he was on the wrong side, shoots the last living werewolf.

Tessa, who arrives in the village with a truck full of relief supplies, arrives just in time for the burial of the dead victims.

Production and publication

The basis for this film were actual events in which the GDR writer Ingeburg Kretzschmar, who was involved in the script, was actively involved. The daily newspaper Daily Rundschau , published by the Soviet military administration in Germany , organized an aid campaign in which orphans and refugee children received accommodation, food and care in a home. For this reason, many situations and figures are designed according to authentic processes and models.

The film, filmed by the DEFA Artistic Working Group “Berlin” and the First Creative Association of the Central Studio for Children’s and Youth Films “Maxim Gorki” from Moscow on ORWO -Color, premiered in Moscow in January 1982 and was first shown in the GDR in Framework of the XI. Festival of Soviet Film shown in the Kosmos cinema in Berlin on October 29, 1982 . The first broadcast on the 2nd program of the GDR television took place on May 6, 1984.

The dramaturgy was in the hands of Gudrun Deubener .

criticism

Horst Knietzsch wrote in Neues Deutschland :

"The dramatic conclusion and some delicately perceived scenes with the children cannot compensate for the fact that the film lacks artistic depth, characters with individual colors who would have been able to break up the episodic."

Günter Sobe remarked in the Berliner Zeitung :

“Although it can only be viewed from 14, the artistic habitus of the strip seems somehow oriented towards children in terms of the information structure. The highly ambitious introduction with repeatedly dismaying documentary recordings does not reverse this impression; on the contrary, it makes everything that follows appear all the more superficial. Today, such a material can no longer be dismissed with primarily informative illustration; you have to bring in an artistically viable idea. "

The lexicon of international films writes that the film , told according to authentic processes, is a very constructed and inconclusive story.

Awards

  • 1981: II. Festival of Young Filmmakers in Minsk: main prize

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neue Zeit of November 2, 1982, p. 4
  2. ^ New Germany of October 29, 1982, p. 4
  3. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of November 2, 1982, p. 7
  4. ↑ Alexander the Little. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 15, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used