Novel
The intertwined lives of people of both Polish and German extraction who live on the pre-World War II border between the two countries are explored in this drama. Valeska is the Polish/German matriarch of a family living on the German side of the border. Her son is involved with the Hitler youth, but nonetheless keeps secret the presence on family land of a Jew who is hiding from the authorities. When the son inadvertently kills a soldier to prevent his sister from being raped, he runs away after borrowing money from the Jewish man. When soldiers come to the family's door looking for the missing soldier who had been billeted there, the Jewish man commits suicide. In another episode, one of the family's daughters marries a German soldier in a ceremony presided over by a Polish priest.
Director
This is an adaptation of film director Horst Blenek's own novel Die Zelle, which is based on the experiences he suffered as a political prisoner in East Germany and in Russia in the '50s. Filmed in black and white, the dark filming emulates the oppression experienced by the prisoner. In the story, the writer is a prisoner who has not yet been "broken." That is, he has not yet succumbed to the skillfully applied tortures and signed a written confession of his so-called crimes. He is supposed to have planned a bombing incident. He endures an escalating number of indignities, until a fellow prisoner tells him what happens at the next level of torture, in which he would be sent to a "psychiatric" hospital.
