A newspaper describes the Terezin concentration camp (Theresienstadt) as a health resort and yet local mercenaries speak a different language. Simon looks on from his hiding place, with a mixture of envy and fear, at the streets he is not allowed to step foot on since it would cost him his life. Terrified, he observes the soldiers outside as they raid neighbouring farms with arbitrary violence and imperious gestures; envious of his peers, to whose number he would like to belong; and with a mixture of affection and contempt towards the woman who has now become his replacement mother.
She, too, has learned to live in mortal fear: of the truth about the fate of her former mistress, the romantic advances of an officer from the collaborationist Hlinka Guard, and the visits of a high-ranking Nazi officer who asks her, on behalf of his wife, to alter some of the clothing he has confiscated. And also of and for this boy in her barn, whom she has grown to love, whom no one is allowed to discover, and who has begun to rebel against her and their enforced coexistence.
Slovak director Iveta Grofová depicts here the trauma of an unequal, fatefully interdependent mother-child relationship in artistic black and white, set to an intense soundscape: as perceived by an individual in hiding.
Text: Bernd Buder
Following all screenings there will be a Q&A with director Iveta Grófová. Language: Czech with German translation
