Die blaue Grenze

Fidelis Lorentz is a composer who earns his living creating theme music for television films. When he receives a call from his great love, J., he suspects she wants to break up with him and promptly boards a train. His destination: Pyeongyang, because if one wants to race against time, it can only be towards the East. As the snowy expanses of Siberia pass by, he mentally travels back to the past: to his great-grandfather, in whose longing for travel Fidelis finds himself—a dreamer from the Bavarian Forest who sailed the seas as a sailor and later drowned in the village pond. To his grandmother, who was pragmatic even in prayer, held no regard for saints, and always addressed the highest authority directly. To her husband, a professional soldier in the Wehrmacht, who could not bear the sight of weapons. They were all deeply shaped by the harshness of the 20th century, yet they rebelled in their own ways against provincial narrowness and the expectations placed upon them, asserting their own lives. Gradually, the present is revealed as well—along with Fidelis's lost love for the mysterious J. Upon arriving in North Korea, a country like a film set, trapped in a glorified past, Fidelis must finally confront the present and the future. Konstantin Ferstl tells a powerful story, full of tenderness and wit, about love, failure, and the rebellious lives of people in the countryside. A virtuosic family epic, a German mythology of the 20th century.