Madonnenwerk

ZONE is a melodrama about a girl with paranormal abilities who fights against a system that tries to calculate and completely record people in a hermetically sealed area. In a time torn from chronology the rebel sets off with a bundle of hope in search of counterspaces and a life that feels like her own. Time and space collapse into each other. A country can be experienced through the pain, sadness and desire of its inhabitants.

This is a story set in the distant past, in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years’ War. In the city of Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains, life is cheap, and the prevailing class divisions and interpersonal relations increasingly intense. The children are taken away from their parents by force, and when they return after many years, they seem to be strangers to them. Yet this is also a story set in modern times where people are still incapable of learning the lessons left for them by the previous generations of cruel divisions. The film is a cinematic experiment dealing with the beauty, fragility, and imperfection of human nature through archetypes and myths.

Between sleeping, waking and dreaming, we experience a collective dream of children who seem to be alone in this world – alone with universal questions and fears for which they must find their own answers. What can the ‘real world’ learn from the games and rituals of children?