Quarterly 4 · 2006 - German Cinema

she even became the cheese queen of the village where she was staying,
so she knows the region and the farmers and their work there
very well,” Paul notes.
In addition to working closely with veteran screenwriter Wolfgang
Kohlhaase (Sommer vorm Balkon) on the screenplay, Staudt further
developed the project at last year’s Moonstone Screenwriters’ Lab in
Scotland and explains that ”Wen der Berg ruft is a film about putting
a relationship on ice that’s barely surviving in tough economic
times. It’s about a cool but spectacular mountain summer and moving
on to greener pastures. The challenge here is not only working hard
at an altitude of 2,000 meters, but also getting along with people from
different cultural backgrounds. For hundreds of years, farmers in the
Swiss Alps have hired workers from abroad to help them out. These
workers are cheaper and work longer hours than the locals – only
fifty years ago, these workers came mainly from Italy or Austria. More
recently, they came from Poland, Ukraine, Moldavia and Macedonia.
Now, more and more Germans are taking up summer jobs because
of the country’s stagnating economy.”
“There are people in Eastern Germany who are at the halfway mark
in life which could or should be the high point, but it seems their lives
are already over,” says Paul, adding that, visually, the film will also
point up the contrast between the mountains in Switzerland and the
bleakness of home back in Eberswalde.
MB
german films quarterly in production
4 · 2006 34