KINDHEIT

A Lower Silesian village in 1944: far away the sounds of war rumble on. The small community would prefer not to hear about it and thus continues its dreamy everyday existence, as it has done for centuries. Nine-year-old Alfons who, like many children during the war, was brought to the countryside from Berlin, a city largely destroyed and under constant threat of bombing, is infatuated with his grandmother. She alone keeps the household running and even dares to defy the local fortune teller on the occasions when the latter's predictions contradict her own visions of the future. One day a showman appears in the village and “grandma” falls in love. For Alfons this represents a bigger disaster than the war itself and so he proceeds to make every effort to interfere with her love for the eccentric Italian, otherwise referred to by villagers as the “gypsy”". Not only Alfons however but also the rest of the village community, most of whom sympathise with the Nazis, perceive this “forbidden” love as an affront. This romantic operetta, at times appearing to be on the verge of transfiguration, evolves into a bitter anti-war story. The original innocent mosaic of Alfon's childhood memories gradually finds itself transformed into a poignant reflection on the loss of a homeland, showing in the process how a once idyllic world can violently disintegrate. KM