[DEUTSCHSTUNDE]

Based on the 1968 novel by Siegfried Lenz, considered to be one of Germany's greatest post-World War II novelists (along with Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Martin Walser), director Christian Schwochow gives a visionary screen treatment to "The German Lesson," working from a screenplay by his mother Heide Schwochow. Siggi Jepsen (Tom Gronau), an inmate in a juvenile detention center in the 1950s, is tasked with writing an essay on "The Joy of Duty." He recalls his youth growing up on an island off the Baltic coast of northern Germany during the Nazi era and World War II, and begins to compulsively fill notebook after notebook as memories flood back. As a young boy (played by Levi Eisenblätter), Siggi had two very different role models: his father Jens (Ulrich Noethen), a conservative, punctilious village constable, and the expressionist painter Max Nansen (Tobias Moretti), a Bohemian freethinker. The two men had been lifelong friends, but after the Nazis banned Nansen's art, labeling it as degenerate, Jens' job dictated that he must carry out a stop-work order on his former friend and seize all of his paintings. Fascinated by Nansen's canvases, Siggi hid several from being confiscated, setting up a terrible series of conflicts that would upend everyone's lives.

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