Versteckte Fallen

Siblings Frank and Simone are allowed to leave the children’s’ home during the holidays and live with the Rattey family, who have bought a country house nearby. What the Ratteys don’t know: the children already lived on the property in the past under different circumstances. The family idyll begins to crumble piece by piece and catastrophe doesn’t seem far way… A DEFA psychological thriller? With his choice of genre, director Rainer Behrend (1955–1993) was already entering new territory with his second production for cinema VERSTECKTE FALLEN (East Germany 1990). Behrend, who loved big-scale Hollywood cinema and had “harder films” in mind for his future artistic careers, created a film that grapples with the loneliness of the individual in society and asked what it means to have no roots. The autumn 1989 shoot coincided with the turbulent period of sociopolitical upheaval. Like most DEFA features that had a theatrical release after the fall of the Wall, VERSTECKTE FALLEN only reached a small audience and is now ripe for rediscovery. (Philip Zengel)