Red Stars Upon the Field: Filmscreening with Q&A
Join us for a screening of the genre-bending historical mystery Red Stars Upon the Field, followed by a conversation with director Laura Laabs. The film will be shown in German with English subtitles; the Q&A will be held in English. The event is free and open to all.
About the Film
After a daring act of political theater at the Reichstag, leftist activist Tine flees Berlin for her hometown of Bad Kleinen, a sleepy village in the East German hinterland. A university research team disturbs the quiet when it unearths a well-preserved skeleton from the marsh, prompting Tine's neighbors — old communist comrades and young right-wing extremists alike — to speculate about its origins. Was he the missing brother of Wehrmacht soldiers? A foreman on a collective farm? Perhaps an investigator hunting militants of the Red Army Faction? Tine's ever-deeper entanglement in the investigation sends her on a breakneck journey through the last hundred years of German history.
Drawing on a wide range of cinematic and historical references — among them 1970s public broadcasting, socialist folk songs, and quotations from Walter Benjamin — Red Stars Upon the Field presents Germany's past and present as an inventive, high-energy patchwork of personal ambition, local controversy, mass movements, and the secrets underlying it all.
About Laura Laabs
Laura Laabs was born in 1985 in East Berlin. She studied Political Science, Cultural Studies and Journalism in Berlin, Potsdam, and Paris, as well as Film Directing at Film University Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg. Her first documentary film Spinach and Sugar portrayed her Jewish grandmother Sibylle Gerstner, who was a painter, writer, and the founder of the legendary East German fashion magazine Sibylle. Laabs’ second film Volksbühne received the Emerging Talent Award at the Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt. In addition to making installations, music videos, and commercials, Laabs writes for academic and literary publications, such as the anthology Aufzeichnungen zu Frauen und Film (“Notes on Women and Film”, Schüren Verlag). She teaches workshops at Deutsche Kinemathek, Komische Oper Berlin, and Film University Konrad Wolf. As co-founder of the feminist film collective r.O.K.S. she developed the series Herstory which re-writes German literature classics from a female point of view.