The cloud (film)

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Movie
Original title The cloud
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2006
length 102 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 12
Rod
Director Gregor Schnitzler
script Jane Ainscough
Marco Kreuzpaintner
production Markus Zimmer
music Max Berghaus
Stefan Hansen
Dirk Reichardt
camera Michael Mieke
cut Alexander Dittner
occupation

The Cloud is a German disaster film by director Gregor Schnitzler from 2006. Marco Kreuzpaintner wrote the screenplay based on the novel of the same name by Gudrun Pausewang .

action

A disaster in the fictitious nuclear power station in Markt Ebersberg near Schweinfurt leads to a worst-case scenario , and the entire area is evacuated from a large area by the disaster control system. Hannah's school is also in the affected area. She is supposed to take care of her younger brother that day, since the mother is in Schweinfurt on business; exactly where the disaster occurred.

Since there is no other way for her to get home the fastest way to the East Hessian town of Schlitz , where her little brother Uli is already waiting for her, Hannah accepts the offer of her classmate Lars and lets him and his friends follow suit Drive home. Until they arrive in Schlitz, where Lars' mother pulls him straight out of the car and yells at the others that her son cannot drive her home but has to flee with his family. Hannah finally continues on foot home, where Uli is already waiting for her. There they find out on the radio what really happened. But since the mother of the two is at a cosmetics congress that day, the two children are on their own.

As recommended by the civil protection service, the children first want to go to the basement for protection while all the neighbors are already fleeing. Hannah and her younger brother want to wait there for Elmar, a classmate from whom she received a kiss shortly before the alarm and who promised her to help her escape. In the midst of the panic, the two finally got a call from their mother: She doesn't want the children to go to the cellar under any circumstances, as the radiation can reach them there, but to drive with the neighbors to Bad Hersfeld , from where they take the train Aunt Helga should go to Hamburg . But since all the neighbors have already fled and Elmar has not shown up (he is fighting at home with the car, wants to short-circuit it because he cannot find his parents' car keys), the children decide to cycle to Bad Hersfeld on their own . On the way there, Uli is run over by a car whose driver is hit and miss. A family with several children takes Hannah to the Bad Hersfeld train station a little later, after the father of the family carried Uli's body into an adjacent corn field. Since the highways are overcrowded, many others want to flee by train. So Hannah has to watch out for the little daughters of the family in the crowd on the platform, as the parents still have to fight their way through. However, Hannah discovers her friend Elmar in the midst of the crowds and walks in his direction - but does not reach him. The couple who took Hannah with them want to know where the children are, whom the girl left behind in search of Elmar; since she is still in shock, she does not reply. While the father finally finds the children, Hannah leaves the station as if in a trance and enters the emptied station forecourt, where seconds later there is a downpour.

Hannah purposely stands in the fallout and collapses shortly afterwards, exhausted. She wakes up again in a hospital near Hamburg. Next to her lies Ayşe, a girl of about the same age, with whom she befriends. Hannah feels tired and sick; a short time later her hair begins to fall out. A little later Elmar comes to the hospital because he found Hannah in a search file and wants to see her. Elmar is also contaminated , but his health is apparently much better than Hannah's. A month later Aunt Helga comes to pick Hannah up. She tells her that her mother is dead and doesn't miss anything, as she was told all along in the hospital. In Hamburg, where Aunt Helga lives, Hannah goes to school again, but remains isolated there because the radiation damage from her bald head is too visible for her and people avoid her. Only Elmar, whose family also fled to Hamburg, sticks to her. Elmar's parents want to go to America with their son, but the latter refuses because he thinks he has no chance and will soon die from the effects of the radiation. He has himself taken to the hospital, as Hannah learns from Ayşe, who is also treated there. Hannah wants to see her boyfriend; she finds him just as he is about to commit suicide, but can stop him at the last minute.

When the (least contaminated) zone 3, in which Hannah's hometown is located, is opened, she and Elmar go there: primarily to bury her brother. After burying Uli in the cornfield, the two of them continue their journey to Schlitz. Elmar claims he can feel a fluff growing back on Hannah's bald head and Hannah eventually sticks her head out to the car's sunroof to let her "hair flutter in the wind".

production

The station in Verviers , Belgium , became the station of Bad Hersfeld for the filming

The mass panic scenes at the train station in Bad Hersfeld could not be filmed on the original location because the Deutsche Bahn refused filming permits for each of its stations. Instead, production switched to the striking Verviers Central station in Belgium, which had previously been "Germanized" with new information boards and signs. Over 400 extras took part in the scene, which was filmed over three days.
The school recordings were filmed at the Lise-Meitner-Gymnasium Unterhaching . The school can also be seen in Schule , the ZDF television series Klimawechsel or in the school comedy Fack ju Göhte .

Differences between film and book

The differences between book and film result partly from the fact that the plot of the film takes place in the time of its appearance; moreover, the plot is overall rather optimistic and allows hope that the characters will continue to live positively, despite all the catastrophes.

  • In the book, the main character (Hannah) is called Janna-Berta and is 14 years old, 15 at the end of the book, instead of 16 at the beginning as in the film.
  • In the book, Janna-Berta also has a father, a second younger brother named Kai, who is still in toddler age, and a maternal grandmother named Jo, who lives in Schweinfurt.
  • In the book, Ayse and (Hannah) Janna-Berta argue after Ayse tears out a tuft of hair. Then they ignore each other and Ayse has a high fever and dies the next day.
  • The book is set in the 1990s, while the film is set in the 2000s; without mentioning cell phones and internet. The GDR is also mentioned because the author could not foresee reunification when she wrote the book in the 1980s.
  • The Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant mentioned in the book and decommissioned in 2015 really exists, whereas the Markt Ebersberg nuclear power plant in the film is fiction.
  • In the book, her grandparents Berta and Hans-Georg also live above the apartment of Hannah's family, but they are on vacation in Mallorca at the time of the accident. The grandparents do not appear in the film, so the component of the very conservative grandparents who advocate nuclear power and even have at least subliminal sympathy for the Third Reich is missing. The opposite image to the two, Jo, the rather unconventional maternal grandmother, was also left out in the film.
  • When Janna-Berta (Hannah) and Uli flee from home, Uli tries to save his hamster Max in the film, while in the book the budgie owned by grandparents Berta and Hans-Georg.
  • The congress in Schweinfurt is not the mother's cosmetics congress, but a congress attended by the father. The mother and the youngest son Kai accompany him to visit Jo in the meantime.
  • Janna-Berta only met Elmar by chance at school in Hamburg, where her aunt Helga took her after the emergency camp and stayed with her. Elmar changes a lot (from best in class to worst in class) and at the end of the school year he commits suicide by overdosing on tablets.
  • In the book, the accident is slightly different: Uli drives down the slope freehand, the bike rolls over and he then lies motionless on the ground. Only then is Uli run over by a car. In the book you don't know whether Uli is already dead or just passed out.
  • In the film, Ulis plush toy is a monkey, in the book it is a teddy bear.
  • After his fatal accident, Uli was not carried into a maize field by his father Heubler, but placed in a rape field.
  • In the book, Janna-Berta has a second aunt named Almut, who is her mother's younger sister (Helga is the father's sister in the book, not the mother's sister as in the film). She spends some time with this after she couldn't stand it anymore with Helga. Then, as in the film, the return to Schlitz follows, which Janna managed to hitchhike on her own.
  • The relationship between Janna-Berta and Helga is tense from the start in the book, but much better in the film. Helga is much more open and friendly here, while in the book she is portrayed as strict and inaccessible.
  • The love story between Janna-Berta and Elmar, as it is portrayed in the film, does not exist in the book, at most as a gentle hint of an incipient friendship, which is destroyed by Elmar's suicide.
  • Janna-Berta does not pass out on the station forecourt as in the film, but wants to run to the rape field and remains on the autobahn, where she is taken by a bus.
  • It is not Elmar who notices the down on Janna-Berta's head, but Almut.
  • Janna-Berta helps Almut to set up a Hibakusha center to help those who have had an accident.
  • The end of the book and the film show serious differences. In the film, a positively painted mood is spread, Hannah and Elmar drive in the car figuratively into their future together. In the book, on the other hand, when Janna-Berta returns to her family's house (badly marked by radiation sickness, for example, she struggles to climb the stairs and remembers her grandmother, who always did the same), she found her just returned from Mallorca still unsuspecting grandparents and hides their bald heads under a hood so as not to spoil the joy of reunion. But when the grandfather immediately afterwards goes on about the "unnecessary excitement" about this "great disaster fairy tale", she takes off her hat and begins to tell the whole terrible truth. Also an open ending, but with a completely different effect, punch line and “moral of the story”.

Reviews

"" The cloud "[...] is [...] honorable craft and good intention. A film that "uses" genre elements to "pick up" its audience. Or: The teenage disaster film as an instrument for objecting to energy policy. [...] It is part of the dramaturgy of the disaster film to show the small, social, family and individual disasters before the actual, the major disaster - along with the traces of redemption. Here, too, "The Cloud" works entirely according to the genre rules. The film describes life in the German provinces with some affection. [...] It has been possible to use the patterns of a genre for a good cause on the one hand and for humane entertainment on the other. All those involved understand their craft without disturbing the good intentions with excessive originality or sophistication. A balance between emotionalizing compulsory parts and occasional freestyle elements of a closer look is achieved. You can find out more in "subsequent discussions" in school presentations. "

- Georg Seeßlen - The daily newspaper :

“However, Schnitzler stripped the highly didactic book template from the family history and trivialized the material by focusing on the unconditional love of two young adolescents. In this way he takes away the bitter taste of the end of the times from the catastrophe and makes the film consumable for the targeted audience. The film takes almost a third of its length to show the microcosm of the protagonists Hannah and Elmar: the slow approach in the classroom, adolescent stress with parents and teachers, a broken party evening, math exams - the normal needs of teenagers. [...] Again and again the director contrasts the young couple's romantic emotional worlds with the horror that surrounds them. [...] In this poeticization of the moment, Schnitzler rises to a very euphemistic happy ending. [...] An open, less euphemistic ending would have been reasonable even for a young audience. "

- Judith Bömer - Editor - Das Filmmagazin :

“Drama and happiness are always neatly sorted one after the other. First the colorful, cool youth, then the leaden country. First sex, then bone cancer - and gloomy death is followed by a happy drive towards the horizon. In real life, the order is less neat. Unfortunately, director Schnitzler does not manage to find images for the invisible. Radioactivity? The wind ruffles the foliage, the cloud is incredibly gray and incredibly big, that's it. The initially carefree kids, the clumsy love, the failing family ties, Schnitzler can do that better. The mass escape scenes are tough too: When it comes to survival, we all become monsters. "

- The daily mirror :

“The fact that the politically explosive topic intersects with a (conventional) teenage romance leads to simplifications, but appears to be a legitimate, always honest way of reaching a target audience that is now largely depoliticized. The book and film come together again when it comes to saying goodbye to illusions and false dreams, to accepting realities and not suppressing them. Especially in quieter, very sensitive moments, the young leading actress captivates with a touching, nuanced game that creates a stable bridge between human catastrophe and great teenage feelings. "

- film service :

"Filming of the youth novel of the same name by Gudrun Pausewang as a mixture of oppressive catastrophe scenario and teenage romance, which manages a difficult balancing act despite its weaknesses in the production. Sensitively played in the main role, the film confronts its young target audience not only with exclusionary behavior, but above all with questions about guilt and responsibility. "

- Lexicon of international film :

Awards

  • Nominated for the German Film Prize 2007 in the category "Best Children's and Youth Film"
  • Bavarian Film Award 2006 - Best Youth Film
  • New Faces Award 2006 (Paula Kalenberg)
  • New Faces Award 2006 (Franz Dinda)
  • The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

Trivia

  • In biology classes, cellulose is referred to as the most important protein in photosynthesis . Cellulose is a carbohydrate because it is made up of glucose molecules.
  • The radio warns of contact with acid rain. Radioactive particles washed out by rain do not cause acid rain. Acid rain is caused by pollutants from burns.
  • In the traffic service the moderators say "Accident on the A3 Hammelburg towards Bad Kissingen" although it should be on the A7 .
  • When Hannah looks on the map to see how far Markt Ebersberg is from Schlitz, you can see that the place is located directly on the position of Grafenrheinfeld (original nuclear power plant from the book), but as "Marktebersberg".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate (PDF; 71 kB) from the FSK
  2. ↑ Age rating for Die Wolke . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Three days of shooting, 400 extras and two trains in Verviers station made the Clasart Film team happy! ( Memento of September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - 34k
  4. ^ Film review Das audiovisuelle Lebkuchenherz
  5. ↑ Film review Radiant love
  6. ↑ Film review monster gray
  7. ↑ Film review Die Wolke ( Memento of the original from July 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.film-zeit.de
  8. ↑ The cloud. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used