» Synopsis
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Time between the years, when everything appears to stand still and when everything has been decorated for sacred celebrations. Time of darkness. Time of fire kindled against cold and fear. During the Holy Night, the seven year old Micha has to escape with his young mother Marianne from the violence of his drunken father.
The most necessary things packed up in a big bag, mother and son secretly leave their basement apartment in a backhouse of an apartment building in Berlin .
Marianne remembers her childhood in the country side of former East Germany . She wants to travel there.
After days, in the moment she thinks to be at the end of there voyage, she finds herself in a landscape covered with ice. The trees are standing rigid in the frozen movements of water. At the horizon, the top of a drowned church is breaking through the wintery soil. Did the place of Marianne's childhood ever exist here? A place now flooded and frozen over. Or is she misled by her memory?
The journey continues. Endless seems to be the country. Snow-covered fields. Frozen lakes. Hard, dark earth. Icy roads. The few houses are abandoned and destroyed. Having run away from her hellish life in the basement, Marianne finds herself in a void, in the apparent endlessness of a glacial age which she cannot fill by any vision of new existence.
During their one week odyssey through frozen Germany , mother and son meet people which offer them shelter. Led by ulterior motives, crushed by their own poverty, or dominated by their feelings of being lost, these people just hurt them deeper and they can be nothing else than stations of their continuous escape.
At the provisional end of their way, in the hotel of an unknown town, Micha and Marianne find a long desired peace. It cannot last.

Source: Catalogue of the 27th International Forum of New Cinema, Berlin 1997
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» Details
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Land: Deutschland 1997/98.
Produktion: poco films GmbH, Berlin, im Auftrag des ZDF.
Regie, Buch, Kamera, Ausstattung, Schnitt: Fred Kelemen.
Regie-Assistenten: Gisa Schleelein, Mandy Rahn, Gina Fischer,
Klaus Bieberthaler.
Kamera-Assistenten: Carsten Thiele, Ann-Katrin Schaffner,
Jonathan Sanford.
Oberbeleuchter: Ki Bun.
Beleuchterin: Sofie Linke.
Ton: Holger Ahrens, Vasco Pimentel, Amy Öström, Javier Moya.
Requisite: Julia Rogge.
Schnitt: Klaus Bieberthaler.
Musik: Charles Mori.
Produktionsleitung: Mandy Rahn.
Produktionsassistentin: Gina Kovács.
Ausführende Produzenten: Fred Kelemen, Björn Koll.
Redaktion: Das kleine Fernsehspiel, Annedore von Donop.
Darsteller: Paul Blumberg, Anna Schmidt, Mario Gericke, Harry Baer,
Isolde Barth, Adolfo Assor, Thomas Baumann.
Format: 16 mm, Farbe.
Länge: 201 Minuten
Uraufführung: 21.2. 1997, Internationales Forum des Jungen Films.
Weltvertrieb: ZDF-International Affairs, P.O. Box 4040, 55100 Mainz, Germany, Phone: +49 6131-702055
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