A village is silent

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title A village is silent
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2009
length 90 minutes
Rod
Director Martin Enlen
script Henriette Piper
production MedienKontor Movie
music Dieter Schleip
camera Philipp Timme
cut Monika Abspacher
occupation

A village is silent is a drama by director Martin Enlen from 2009. In the lead role , Katharina Böhm plays the young mother Johanna Dawe, who arrives as a war refugee in a north Hessian village with her two children and a teenager she takes care of.

action

The film takes place in the immediate post-war period of the Second World War . Johanna Dawe arrives with her two children and the orphaned teenager Heinz, whom she wants to protect, on the run from Silesia on the back of a truck in a Hessian village. They are not welcome there as war refugees. The passers-by call them “Colorado beetles” and chant “Skin off!”, While local children throw stones at the newcomers. When the stone throwers are driven away, they flee across a field. A child steps on a mine and dies along with two other children.

Grudgingly accepted by the population, Johanna and her children are supposed to stay in the parsonage, but the pastor refuses to accept the four people. The mayor then places her in the house of his sister Gisela, because her fifteen-year-old son was killed in the mine explosion and his father is missing, so he suspects that there is now room for the refugee family in her house.

There she is reluctantly accepted. As a result, Gisela notices that Johanna is doing everything in her power to cause her as few inconveniences as possible. As it becomes clear over time that the refugee family does not bring any lice into their house, as Gisela initially suspected, Johanna is even allowed to help out in her hairdressing salon, which she has set up in the house, and thus earn a little extra income.

Again and again the children and the youngster get Johanna in trouble, for example when the scissors are borrowed without asking or the funeral feast (cake) is eaten by the children.

When the day came when the children killed in the mine explosion were to be buried, the mourners present noticed that the pastor had left out the final blessing for Gisela's son. A murmur goes through the crowd, the guests are amazed. At the same time, Paul Hofmann, returning from the war, arrives at the funeral and sees his wife crying by the open grave. He notices that their son has probably died and collapses from grief. After he comes to, he realizes that he has become a different person because of the shock that his son is no longer alive and because of the terrible events of the war that he had to endure. Everything in the village has become alien to him. When he goes to sleep with his wife, he accuses her of having believed in Hitler's victory until the last moment, after which he tries to rape her.

It turns out later that Paul gets on better with Johanna, who fled Silesia, than with his wife. Johanna prepares good-tasting noodles from the grain that the children have collected from the surrounding fields. She brought the recipe for it with her from her Silesian homeland, this type of preparation is unknown in the Hessian region. Soon the first residents became aware of the deliciously prepared noodles, even the military of the American occupation forces were interested in it.

This gives Johanna the idea to sell her pasta. At the black market where Johanna intended to sell her pasta product, the youth Heinz is arrested by the military police because there is a suspicion in the room that he had stolen the pasta or the grain used for it. As a result, Heinz is released again because he is not of criminal age.

Since Johanna suspects that it was Gisela who tried to blacken Heinz with the military police, she decides to move out of the house and come to the priest after all. He now agrees, but an open hostility between mayor and pastor, but also between individuals in the village, is clearly evident. When she arrives at the rectory, Johanna makes herself useful and first of all cleans everything up properly. During this action she comes across a room that has obviously not been inhabited for a long time. The pastor forbids her to enter the room. He explains to her that it is the room of his son Martin, who deserted from the Volkssturm and, after the hiding place was betrayed, was shot three days before the American invasion. Johanna promises never to enter the room out of respect, but the pastor changes his mind and asks her to use his son's belongings if necessary.

In the further course, Johanna often goes into the nearby forest, where she repeatedly meets a young person who is hiding there. It turns out that it is the son of Paul and Gisela, who was believed to be dead, fifteen-year-old Walter, who has been hiding here from the occupying forces since the American invasion. In addition to food, Johanna also brought him a jacket from the pastor's executed son. Only then does she find out from the pastor that it was Walter who had denounced his son. The next day she goes to Walter to ask for the jacket back when his mother Gisela shows up, followed by her husband, who takes his son, who was believed dead, in his arms. Then Walter goes to church and asks the pastor for forgiveness, but the pastor refuses forgiveness with the words “I can't do that”.

The film ends when Johanna makes the decision to leave the village with her children and the orphaned Heinz and move to Frankfurt am Main.

Publication date and working title

Produced in 2008, A Village Silent was broadcast on ZDF for the first time on April 9, 2009 . The working title was “The Colorado beetles are coming”.

Reviews

The Lexicon of International Films states that the film succeeds in depicting the fate of refugees in the immediate post-war period and, in doing so, is able to sound out the aversion of locals towards refugees in a differentiated manner.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A village is silent (TV Movie 2009) - Release Info - IMDb. In: imdb.com. Retrieved September 21, 2015 .
  2. ↑ a b A village is silent in the lexicon of international filmTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used