The hour of the daughters

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Movie
Original title The hour of the daughters
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1981
length 97 minutes
Rod
Director Erwin Stranka
script Erwin Stranka
production DEFA , KAG Berlin
music Karl-Ernst Sasse
camera Peter Brand
cut Evelyn Carow
occupation

The Hour of the Daughters is a DEFA feature film by Erwin Stranka from 1981.

action

Richard Roth, late fifties, widowed, manager of a company in Weimar , a person who helped build socialism all his life . After a soccer game, which he attended with friends and colleagues, he got a heart attack while getting on the bus . The youngest daughter Nanny, who still lives in her father's apartment, is notified but is not admitted to her father's sickbed. Now she first informs her three sisters about the condition of her father.

There is Ruth, the oldest, who works as an engineer on a large Baltic shipyard. She comes closest to her father, is capable and recognized, but has remained alone. She also suffers from an incurable eye disease that will lead to blindness. Then comes Eva, who is married to a highly qualified brain surgeon and works as a teacher. She is not supposed to get any leave from the headmaster for the trip to see her sick father, as she is needed at school. But she makes it clear that she will drive without a vacation pass. Gerda is the third daughter who is married to a foreign trade merchant and has two children with him. The third is on the way. They are living in divorce because they no longer meet the demands of their husband. There remains a nanny who is still looking for herself. She has a friend who will soon be delegated to the Soviet Union to study for several years .

A visit to the four sisters at their father's bedside is not permitted by the attending physician, and attempts to use Eva's private relationships as a doctor's wife are unsuccessful. Only Nanny, who has already waited several hours on the entrance stairs to the hospital, is admitted briefly. Richard Roth doesn’t stay long on the sickbed, because he’s one of those who have to be active and active. When it became clear that he could no longer work as a manager, he took a job as a security guard in the porter's lodge at his company. In view of the life-threatening heart attack he has experienced, he now asks himself what has become of his four daughters, what of him will continue to live in them.

Nanny's boyfriend has since left to study and she meets a young man from her father's business. He works there as a brigadier who is always deployed with his mates where something does not work in the company and who opposes such working methods. Nanny likes him, although she is not yet sure how her life will go on. When her boyfriend unexpectedly goes on vacation from the Soviet Union, he realizes the situation and separates from her.

Eva has since quit her teaching position in order to be there for her husband alone, who has civic reservations about socialist society. He rejects her desire to have children with reference to his constant radiation exposure. He does not return to the GDR from a visit to a congress in the Federal Republic of Germany , she surrenders to alcohol, she is not reinstated at school and only lives from the sale of the accumulated antiques.

Gerda, who is simple, simple and motherly, is divorced from her husband, a cold-hearted careerist . He is awarded the two children because she is unable to fight for them. Through her father's mediation, she gets to know his large colleague, a widower, who has now had her third child. It starts with Gerda taking care of the children every now and then. So they both get closer, she takes over the household and they both get married. Thanks to Richard's efforts, his, now former, colleague will head an FDGB home in Eichsfeld and Gerda will take a job in a doll factory, where she can further qualify. And she's pregnant again!

Ruth slowly thinks of herself and thinks about expanding the acquaintance with a colleague from the higher-level office in Berlin . At the beginning of a cruise on the vacation ship , the friendship of the peoples , which she received from her father, she happened to meet this colleague again on the ship. Here he introduces her to his wife, with whom he is on his honeymoon.

One day Richard Roth is sitting in his porter's lodge and no longer moves. The doctor who is called can only determine the cardiac arrest.

production

Filming locations for the outdoor shots were, among others, Weimar (including the Buchenwald Memorial ), Leipzig and on the holiday ship Völkerfreudschaft . Walter Stranka was responsible for the scenario and the dramaturgy was in the hands of Werner Beck .

The DEFA studio for feature films (Artistic Working Group “Berlin”) shot The Hour of the Daughters on ORWO color. The film had its premiere in the cinema on February 26, 1981 in the Berlin Kosmos and the television premiere took place on July 2, 1982 in the first program of the television of the GDR .

criticism

Horst Knietzsch found in New Germany that he could have imagined that the ensemble of figures would be more complex and thus lead to greater artistic depth. That could also have saved from some simplification in the representation of the conflicts and the characters and given the characters a stronger individual environment. But the film gives enough suggestions to compare what you have seen with your own experiences.

Helmut Ullrich was in the New Era , the intellectual milieu portrayed in the film only as a cheap and spiteful caricature.

For the lexicon of international films , this film is too non-binding, superficial and too transparent and exaggerated in its critical intentions.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neues Deutschland, March 3, 1981, p. 4
  2. ↑ Neue Zeit of April 27, 1982, p. 4
  3. ↑ The hour of the daughters. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used