A 201-minute Christmas movie where the only gift is survival.
Time of darkness. Time of fire kindled against cold and fear. During the Holy Night, the seven year old Micha has to escape with his young mother Marianne from the violence of his drunken father... During their one week odyssey through frozen Germany, mother and son meet people to offer them shelter... Crushed by their own poverty, or dominated by their feelings of being lost, these people just hurt them deeper and they can be nothing other than stations of their continuous escape
Cinematography
Black-and-white frost that bites through screen.
Direction
Kelemen's unbroken takes refuse to let you breathe.
Director
Fred Kelemen
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Kelemen shot this in actual East German winter using minimal crew, often in real locations with non-professional locals who'd experienced similar privations.
Released two years before the millennium, it's been read as an elegy for post-reunification Germany's abandoned working class — the 'economic miracle' left these people frozen in place.
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