Osceola (film)
Osceola is a DEFA - Indian film by the film director Konrad Petzold from 1971. The western, produced in cooperation with Kino-Zentrum Sofia (Bulgaria) and ICAIC Havana (Cuba), is about the struggle of the Indian chief Osceola and his tribe for their fields and pastures in the South of North America they must defend against rich white Americans. On the other hand, the film also addresses the role of the black population in this dispute.
The premiere took place on June 26, 1971 in the Rostock open-air theater. The film was released in GDR cinemas on July 30, 1971. The original title of the film was Osceola ; the German video / DVD publications run under the reference title Osceola - The Right Hand of Retribution .
action
1835. The Indian chief Osceola and his tribe, the Seminoles , live peacefully in Florida from farming and hunting. They strive for a peaceful coexistence with their white neighbors. Some of them have the same interests as the anti-slavery Moore , who owns a sawmill nearby. Moore also employs people of color, but not as slaves , but as wage laborers. But there are also some who have long been a thorn in the side of the Seminoles , such as the rich plantation owner and slave owner Raynes , who wants to grow sugar cane in the country. Some runaway slaves live with the Seminoles in what he sees as stealing "private property".
When his daughter reports to him that Osceola had attacked her (in reality he only wanted to help her) and that another slave managed to escape to the Indians, Raynes decides to act. He hires some thugs and the slave overseer Hammer to lure the Indians into a trap and then exterminate them. Major Thompson (the army supports Raynes in his project, as the government also wants the land of the Seminoles) bribes the Seminole chief Emathla with a lot of money and only demands the resettlement of the Seminoles in an "extremely fertile land" in Arkansas. Osceola witnesses the bribery and advises his tribe members not to follow Emathla, as he suspects this is a trap. In self-defense he shoots Emathla and is able to prevent a large number of Seminoles from falling into the trap of the white deceivers.
Only a handful of Indians believe the false promises, they moved on despite the warning and were shot down in cold blood by Hammer and his people a little later. When that plan went wrong, Raynes hired Hammer to kidnap Osceola's wife Che-Cho-Ter . When a large number of slaves who had fled from a gunboat were shot at by a gunboat , Osceola realized that he could no longer prevent the war and intervened. First he frees his wife from Raynes ' hands , where Hammer dies and burns down the mansion, then he uses a ruse to blow up the gunboat. In the end, the slaves who fled can flee on boats together with the Indians. Moore , whose sawmill was destroyed by the gunboat, flees north because he no longer has an existence in Florida. For the Seminoles this is the beginning of a seven-year war that will claim many more victims on both sides.
criticism
"A straightforwardly told Indian film , " judged the lexicon of international films , while Joe Hembus described the film as "as authentic and as exciting as a school radio program".
Web links
- Osceola in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Osceola at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Entry on filmportal.de ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Osceola. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Joe Hembus: The Western Lexicon . extended new edition by Benjamin Hembus. Munich 1995, p. 469
