The horse girl (film)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The horse girl |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1979 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Egon Schlegel |
| script | Margot Beichler |
| production | DEFA , KAG "Johannisthal" |
| music | Gunther Erdmann |
| camera | Wolfgang Braumann |
| cut | Anneliese Hinze-Sokolowa |
| occupation | |
| |
The Pferdemädchen is a German children's film of the DEFA of Egon Schlegel from the year 1979. It is based on the eponymous children's book by Alfred Wellm .
action
The twelve-year-old Irka and her mare Raya understand each other blindly - literally, as the old horse can no longer see. It was only in autumn of the previous year that Irka's father bought the former competition horse from a stud farm not far from his small property and was laughed at because an old, blind horse usually only gets the horse butcher. Irka, however, lovingly takes care of the mare and rides out with her, carefully prompting and explaining every stone and tree. Despite the care, Raya is worse off in the spring. She sweats heavily, even though she stands well in the food. The old horse connoisseur Möller finally knows the reason: Raya is pregnant. In a thunderstorm night the mare gives birth to her foal, but does not allow the little stallion to suckle. Only after a good night's sleep is Irka and her father able to bring mare and stallion together.
The nocturnal action and the fear for the newborn foal have closely connected Irka with the young animal. The girl is now increasingly devoting herself to the stallion, educating him and teaching him tricks. Her father has promised to keep both animals, and although the little stallion is too cocky for the blind Raya, the family always finds ways to enable both animals to live a species-appropriate life side by side. Only old Möller ruthlessly realizes that Irka's family cannot possibly keep both animals together. The stallion would become unpredictable when fully grown and Irka's father is not a horse expert. In addition, both animals could not be kept in a box, so Irka's father would have to build a new stable. The father has long known these facts, but he has not yet had the courage to tell Irka about them. He evades her questions and yet one day Irka sees her father negotiating about the foal with workers from the nearby stud. Nevertheless, he gives Irka a choice: either the family keeps the foal or the mare. When Irka learns from Möller that Raya would be taken to the butcher in the event of a sale, she flees into the forest with her mare and foal, but is found by her father. The foal is picked up the next day. Irka stays behind with the blind mare, which she is now riding out again and tells her about every group of stones and every tree along the way.
production
The horse girl premiered on July 5, 1979 at the Berlin Children 's Summer Film Festival and in the Erfurt Panorama Palast. The film was released in GDR cinemas on July 6, 1979 and was released on DVD in June 2007 in the Icestorms Flimmerstunde series .
The main actress of the film Märtke Wellm, 13 years old at the time of shooting, is the daughter of Alfred Wellm, who wrote the original book for the film. In the role of this girl Irka, she made the painful conflict so relentlessly visible that no one left the cinema unaffected, "said journalist Knut Elstermann, looking back. After Kaule (1967), The Horse Girl was the second DEFA film adaptation of a children's book by Alfred Wellm.
criticism
The contemporary critics praised the film: “ The horse girl is probably the most beautiful and artistically successful children's film that DEFA has ever made,” wrote the Berliner Zeitung in 1979. The “aesthetically beautiful horse photos” and the “ Harmony of animals and landscape ”. This turns out to be "a particular strength of the film, which proves its striking advantages where it captures the atmosphere of the Mecklenburg landscape, its calm and gentle harshness."
In retrospect, other critics wrote that the film was “a total work of art of rare poetic power. As a parable, in this everyday story, told unspectacularly by Alfred Wellm, questions of our responsibility for nature and the relationship between life and death are brought to the fore. The cinematic adaptation follows this claim uncompromisingly and doesn’t allow the slightest comparison with conventional horse farm films ”.
The horse girl is a "quiet, haunting [r] film" that "causes great dismay, far from whitewashing childhood drama". At the same time it creates Director Schlegel also "generate increasing tension that far is popular thriller effects." In the film The filmdienst summarized that the Pferdemädchen a "poetic, narrated in beautiful images, in spite of its emotional content never sentimental children's film" be.
Awards
At the Gijón International Festival for Children's and Young People's Films , The Horse Girl received the prize for best children's film in 1980. At the National Festival for Children's Films in the GDR Goldener Spatz in Gera , the film was awarded an honorary diploma for overall artistic performance in 1981.
The film received the state rating "valuable".
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 453-454 .
- The horse girl . In: Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, Lothar Wolf (eds.): Between Marx and Muck. DEFA films for children . Henschel, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-89487-234-9 , pp. 262-264.
Web links
- The horse girls in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The horse girl at filmportal.de
- The horse girl at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Certificate of Release for The Horse Girl . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , April 2007 (PDF; re-examination, formerly FSK 6, test number: 109670DVD).
- ↑ a b Knut Elstermann: I used to be a film child. DEFA and its youngest actors . Das neue Berlin, Berlin 2011, p. 15.
- ↑ Günter Sobe: The amazing encounter with the horse girl . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 3, 1979.
- ↑ Wolfgang Lange: First love . In: Film und Fernsehen , No. 6, 1979, p. 28.
- ↑ The horse girl . In: Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, Lothar Wolf (eds.): Between Marx and Muck. DEFA films for children . Henschel, Berlin 1996, p. 263.
- ↑ The horse girl . In: Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, Lothar Wolf (eds.): Between Marx and Muck. DEFA films for children . Henschel, Berlin 1996, p. 264.
- ↑ Joachim Giera: Don't be afraid of feelings . In: Filmspiegel , No. 17, 1979, p. 12.
- ↑ The horse girl. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed December 13, 2016 .
- ↑ The horse girls in defa-stiftung.de