Alert Film

An actor and poet falls in love with a former mortuary photographer turned waitress. They find themselves caught up way over their heads in a dirty political and financial affair, an art smuggling case that touches them merely for the fact that it may separate them, be it through death or exile.

This story is told by the boy's father: "My father wrote letters from the front. He didn't come back from the war. In my dream, I saw a hundred thousand letters falling from the sky." The letters are memories and trauma. No one talks about them. The boy knows nothing yet about the legacy of all wars. The setting for this story is a former military airfield and its surroundings.

When East Germany ceases to be separate from its western half, one would think that things would be better for the couple in this movie who have been plagued by sexual and political harassment of the most virulent kind, but , they are completely unprepared to cope with the swift changes that are transforming their familiar yet desperately unhappy world. In the story, Heinz is a laborer in the cooperative apple orchards of an East German village and has married his sweetheart Lena. She works to take care of the sickly wife of the co-op's manager and also must cope with the sexual attentions of the perfidious man. One day, after discovering this state of affairs, Heinz blows up and assaults his wife's harasser, which only serves to land him in jail. While in prison, the state secret police (the Stasi) get him to help them entrap the co-op manager, whom they believe is going to try to defect.

"Cause of Death Unknown" - Carola Neher (1900-1942) actress, singer and feminist. Brecht wrote the role Polly Peachum for her. She practiced boxing with Marlene Dietrich. After Hitler seized power, thousands of German communists and anti-fascists fled to the Soviet Union, the "fatherland of the working people". The tragedy of German communism is that the vast majority of them perished or were lost during Stalin's "cleansing". Carola Neher is one of the fate figures of that time. In the 20s, she belonged to the narrow circle of Brecht actresses. The film accompanies her son Georg Becker in search of his mother's traces in the sinking Soviet Union.