The shots of Noah's Ark
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The shots of Noah's Ark |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1983 |
| length | 89 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Egon Schlegel |
| script | Günter Mehnert |
| production | DEFA |
| music | Gunther Erdmann |
| camera | Peter Brand |
| cut | Ilona Thiel |
| occupation | |
| |
The shots of Noah's Ark is a German children's film of the DEFA of Egon Schlegel from the year 1983 .
action
The children's film "The Shots of Noah's Ark" tells the odyssey of an innocent ten-year-old boy through the cruel world of fascism and the fascist war. In the last year of the Second World War, Klaus Wensloff lived in a contradicting world. His father is an active anti-fascist, listens to and broadcasts the news of the “enemy radio stations”, forges ID cards and ration cards to help the persecuted, hides people at risk and describes Hitler as a criminal. At school, however, Klaus hears from the revered teacher that Hitler is the best German, and his friend is Pimpf , who repeatedly challenges him to new tests of courage. That is not the only contradiction in Klaus' life: his mother is a believing Christian, while his father, as a communist, rejects God. Klaus is not always able to deal properly with these contradictions in his everyday life. Every mistake can be life threatening. This becomes particularly clear when a Jewish family suddenly stands in their apartment after an air raid and they grant this shelter. Eventually everything is discovered and the two families have to flee. Of course, the hidden family will be given new papers beforehand.
Klaus' mother is killed in an air raid on Berlin and he is brought to East Prussia by his father, where he stayed with a woman who had already taken in several children. As the Red Army drew closer and closer, he got caught up in the inferno of the war and was pushed from the German side to the Soviet side. He quickly made friends with the Soviet soldiers. But when he waved to German low-flying pilots during an attack with the cry “They are ours”, his disruption became apparent again. In order to protect him from direct fighting at the front, he was then housed by a Soviet officer in a Polish monastery, where already neglected German children have found refuge. Here he can use his Polish language skills well, which he acquired from the Polish farm workers who worked there at his previous foster home.
In all the chaos, which the boy cannot understand, he finds support and consolation in the memories of his mother, her story about Noah's ark (it was completely incomprehensible for Klaus that there were no cannons on Noah's ark), which are in his imagination the father's report of the armored cruiser “ Aurora ” and Lenin , the captain of the world revolution, are mixed up. No matter how confusing and terrible the boy's experiences may be, his father's ideas of the revolution, a just world determined by Lenin, always remain alive. The elementary power of these ideas, together with the experiences they have lived through, ultimately enables them to find the right path for them in an important decision-making situation. When the Soviet officer wanted to pick him up again, he decided against the monastery, even though he had just passed the entrance examination for the priestly school. He leaves the monastery and follows the call of his father and the world revolution to Berlin alongside the Red Army.
production
The film is based on the novel The Shots of Noah's Ark or The Mistakes and Odds of My Friend Wensloff , which was written by Peter Abraham in 1970 based on autobiographical memories. The shooting on the estate took place in Heinrichsdorf, near Wittstock. The group “Babelsberg” shot it on ORWO Color and it premiered on February 4, 1983 in the Haus der Kultur in Gera . At the Gera children's film festival " Goldener Spatz " the film was awarded three prizes from three different juries in 1983, including the Findlings Prize .
criticism
In New Germany , Henryk Goldberg has the feeling that Schlegel stages more atmosphere than lively people. It is difficult for the child-like leading actor to offer himself to the viewer as a partner and has few opportunities to actively raise the audience's awareness. Ehrentraud Novotny found in the Berliner Zeitung that adventurous, impressive and humorous sentences characterize this film. In the Neue Zeit it says after the premiere that not everything in this film turned out as well as the scene where the little hero wandered around with a helpless baby in a deserted no man's land.
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 517-518 .
Web links
- The shots of Noah's Ark in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The shots of Noah's Ark at filmportal.de
- The shots of Noah's Ark at the DEFA Foundation