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Freudental

Trailer

DIRECTED BY

Thomas Lahusen

in collaboration with
Steffen Pross

DOP:

Gulzat Egemberdieva

 

Digital HD, color & black and white,

65 min.

Release: Fall 2020

An archaeological journey into a family’s roots: a grandfather born in Buenos Aires, raised in a family of German industrialists, warplane pilot during World War One, and known as the composer of Christian liturgical music; his wife, born in a peasant Jewish family from Freudental, near Stuttgart, who lost most of her relatives during Hitler's time; the narrator's mother who had to leave the Berlin Music Academy because she bore the stigma of “half-Jewish”; and a few Freudental family members who were able to emigrate to America. The film leads the viewer from burning Berlin in 1944 to the idyllic house where the narrator was born, on a hill looking onto the Lake of Constance, under which a secret aviation factory was built in early 1945 by inmates from Dachau. Other places are the narrator’s residence in a Toronto high rise; Munich of the 1920s where his grand-father met his wife and started his career as a composer; Auschwitz, to search for the traces of the family’s relatives; Berlin of the early 1940s, and finally Freudental today, where Jewish descendants of the village convene to reconnect to their roots. The film includes family photos, official documents, and archival footage, mainly from the German Federal Archive.


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