New Year's Eve can go away
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | New Year's Eve can go away |
| Country of production | Germany |
| Publishing year | 1980 |
| length | 46 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Renée Verdan |
| production | NDR |
| camera | Wolfgang Zeh |
| cut | Birgit Levin |
| occupation | |
| |
Sylvester can disappear is a German children's film by the director Renée Verdan , which was broadcast in 1980 on the first ARD program. The film, set in a dystopian near future, is about a group of children trying to break free from the corset of an all-controlling surveillance society. They receive support from Sylvester, a young former teacher who teaches the children how to escape the control system, at least temporarily.
action
The ten-year-old girl Kirsa moves with her parents to a modern, brightly colored city in which all processes are controlled by an automated control system. During school lessons, but also during the lunch break and in outdoor areas, the children are constantly indoctrinated by headphone and loudspeaker announcements. In the afternoons after school, children are expected to take part in organized recreational programs. Instead, Kirsa and her classmates spend their time uncontrollably in the public space between the prefabricated buildings of their sunshine settlement. When they are picked up by uniformed supervisors, a young man appears who introduces himself as a "leisure programmer" and thus saves the children from punishment.
The young man, whom the children only know by the name of Sylvester, develops into their accomplice in an attempt to escape the ubiquitous surveillance by the loudspeakers and sensors of the control system. He teaches them sign language and shows them how to make themselves invisible by disguising themselves as stones or bushes. Together they sabotage the control system with drums, pocket mirrors and by running in slow motion, which messes up the sensors and the time base of the computer. Some children manipulate the classroom electrics with the help of a cassette recorder so that rock music can be played from the headphones during English lessons in the language laboratory . The behavior of the children finally arouses the headmistress' suspicion when they do not trace the given geometric shapes during the drawing class, but let their creativity run free. She reproaches the teacher Mrs. Krüger for not being able to control the children or not wanting to.
After New Year's Eve no longer shows up for the joint meetings, the children unlearn sign language and increasingly turn to the official leisure programs. But Kirsa becomes close friends with Philipp, who was originally skeptical about New Year's Eve, but now wants to learn sign language from her. Philipp teaches Kirsa how to play the piano. When Kirsa and Philipp also disappeared for a few days, Ms. Krüger and all the children decide to go looking for them. Under the protest of the control system, they leave the school building and scour the area.
The last scene takes place again in the language laboratory after Kirsa and Philipp as well as all the other children have been caught again and supposedly brought to reason. The teacher, Mrs. Krüger, was dismissed because she had made herself the children's accomplice. The children are informed by loudspeaker that a new teacher named Jürgen Hensen has been hired to replace them. To the delight of the children, this turns out to be New Year's Eve, who immediately takes off his uniform-like clothing and begins to communicate with the children in sign language.
publication
New Year's Eve can disappear was shown for the first and only time on January 16, 1980 in the first ARD program.
production
The members of the children's theater group "Randale Altona" acted as actors in the film. The exterior shots were taken in the Lenzsiedlung in the Hamburg district of Lokstedt . The Mümmelmannsberg educational center in the Billstedt district served as the school building for both indoor and outdoor shots . The buildings were built in the mid and early 1970s and were therefore examples of modern, but not necessarily desirable, residential or school architecture at the time the film was made.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Achim Klünder: Lexikon der Fernsehspiele 1978–1987 , Volume 1. Saur, 1991, ISBN 3-598-10836-2 .