The Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival went to a powerfully crafted story of forbidden love between a Wehrmacht sergeant and a Jewish schoolteacher in a Bulgarian town in 1943, where Greek Jews awaited deportation to Auschwitz. Acclaimed for its striking visual style, the recently restored film stands as the first German production to acknowledge the existence of the largest concentration and extermination camp. Stars brought international recognition to the East German filmmaker Konrad Wolf, whose deeply humanistic perspective on the tragic milestones of the twentieth century was matched by an impressively sophisticated formal approach.HvězdyThe Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival went to a powerfully crafted story of forbidden love between a Wehrmacht sergeant and a Jewish schoolteacher in a Bulgarian town in 1943, where Greek Jews awaited deportation to Auschwitz. Acclaimed for its striking visual style, the recently restored film stands as the first German production to acknowledge the existence of the largest concentration and extermination camp. Stars brought international recognition to the East German filmmaker Konrad Wolf, whose deeply humanistic perspective on the tragic milestones of the twentieth century was matched by an impressively sophisticated formal approach.
Konrad Wolf (1925–1982), born in Germany to a Jewish communist family, fled to Moscow in 1933 from the Nazis. His life was defined by a dual Soviet and East German identity. His return to his native country in 1945 as a Red Army soldier was the source of his autobiographical film, "I Was Nineteen" (1968). He directed some fifteen films between 1955 and 1980, focusing on Germany and its complexity, specifically how emotions like love and melancholy lead to political consciousness. "In Divided Heaven" (1964) and "Solo Sunny" (1980) (directed with Wolfgang Kohlhaase), he examined the Soviet bloc utopia with a critical gaze while portraying his female characters with benevolence.
