Red stars upon the field

After attending a political protest, Tine goes into hiding in her home village. When a skeleton appears from the moor, suppressed stories from a century of German history are revealed. In a mix of crime, historical film, and political drama, Laura Laabs shows how history interacts with the present, and how collective memory begins to show cracks.

Springtime in Germany: Young activist Tine must go into hiding after her latest political act could be classified as terrorism. In her home village, Bad Kleinen, she finds refuge on her father’s run-down farm. But the apparent calm in the eastern German province ends abruptly when a decades-old skeleton is recovered from the moor right in front of her house. The village is thrown into turmoil as the discovery brings to light suppressed stories from a century of German history.

Tine starts her own research and comes across three possible stories: a Wehrmacht soldier who disappeared during the Second World War, a victim of the RAF raid in 1993, and an inconvenient foreman during the GDR era. While diving deeper into the layers of collective memory, she is confronted with her own family history and the political tensions of the present – from far-right tendencies in the village to new forms of resistance.

In RED STARS UPON THE FIELD, Laura Laabs intertwines the genres of crime, historical film, and political drama to create a multi-layered work of memory, forgetting, and the fragile lines of reality. It is precisely in the peculiarities of style, such as changing picture formats, an associative narrative style, and narrative leaps, that reality itself can be experienced as contradictory and permeated with memories.

Image © Amerikafilm GmbH