Red stars over the field movie review

“Only those who know the past can understand the present and shape the future,” said August Bebel, co -founder of the SPD. At the latest after the Second World War and the Holocaust, this quote became a kind of guide from the German nature. Hardly any country forms as much on its handling of our own past as we Germans – not always rightly accompanied by a certain arrogance towards those peoples who actually or supposedly deal with the dark spots of our own past.

Which blind spots are always available in one's own perception and how current interests influence the interpretation of the past is a central aspect of “Red stars over the field“. In her remarkable directorial debut, which was awarded the Prize of Film Critics at the Max Ophüls Film Festival, Laura Laabs, with a great narrative and staging joy of experimentation, brings together different time levels to a sometimes exhausting and overloaded, but in an always exciting manner.

Insanely ambitious and exciting: In

Insanely ambitious and exciting: In “Red Stars over the field”, almost 100 years of German history are thrown together!

The activist Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) has red flags blow over the Reichstag. Together with a colleague, she managed to set an example at the center of German politics – and now she has to flee from state power. She drives to the country, the province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommers, to Bad Kleinen. There her father Uwe (Hermann Beyer) lives in one house and lets life pass each other. He struggles with the upheavals of the story he had to witness over his years, not least because of his wife's disappearance.

Not far from his house, a decayed skeleton is found shortly afterwards, the origin of which puzzles. Is the body in the ground for decades or only for a few years? Does it come from the times of the GDR or maybe even from World War II? Or maybe from the 1990s, when the hope for the promised flowering landscapes slowly dried up in the former zone edge area and instead another event made headlines …

Better too many than too few ambitions

It does not often happen that you want to accuse a German film to be almost too ambitious: Laura Laabs jumps from “red stars over the field” with various different image formats in the sprawling 130 minutes, it counteracts agitative scenes Anarchical humor and varies the favorite German genre, the thriller. In addition, she also tells of the Second World War, the new right and the RAF. This is a lot and that doesn't always coincide with a hundred percent. But if you can't really let off steam in your directorial debut, when?

Finders of the recent German history and above all the final of the terrorist organization RAF will be caught up with the name Bad Kleinen: In June 1993 there was an accident, in which the police wanted to arrange two terrorists of the so -called third generation. But the campaign went wrong, a police officer was shot and RAF member Wolfgang Grams was killed. After years of examinations officially through suicide, a judgment that is currently being questioned by the left – especially since there was always rumors that a third, unknown person was still present in Bad Kleinen.

Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) is drawn deeper into the mystery around the safe skeleton.

Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) is drawn deeper into the mystery around the safe skeleton.

Laura Laabs plays with this myth – or, depending on the point of view, conspiracy theory. It creates authentic-looking TV images, the coarse-grained 4: 3 format forms a nice contrast to the extreme scope format with which the game scenes from the 1990s are staged. Most scenes of the film play in the present, but it also goes back to the time of the Second World War, i.e. in the German original catastrophe of the 20th century, the mainly psychological consequences of which can still be felt-of course in black and white filmed. Perhaps the decayed skeleton that almost works like a MacGuffin comes, so on one side drives the plot, but turns out to be not really important, yes, from this era? But it may also be the third RAF person or even Tine's missing mother.

Laura Laabs continues to spin the network of references and refer to, tells of the desire for social change, which seems to take a completely different dimension in the capital Berlin. In the province, on the other hand, you can see “our village community: free-social-international” oversized on a barn. Here it is almost a matter of course that the men's bodies are covered with tattoos of imperial eagles and swastikas and that they rarely put the bottle of beer down. A typical view of the outside, characterized by clichés, might think. But Laura Laabs comes from the former east, was born shortly before the turn in East Berlin, thereby looking at the East German province and its inhabitants with a certain skepticism, but also great sympathy. Their view of German history became even more complicated by the additional upheaval, as can be experienced impressively in this meandering, playful, excessive debut film.

Conclusion: In her debut film “Red Star over the field”, Laura Laabs leads across German history from the Second World War to the present, plays with references and references, image formats and genre patterns, which can be used to an ambitious and original film leads how one would like to see him so brave and urgent in the German cinema.