With filmmaker Laura Laabs in person

German Movie Nights returns with a screening of Red Stars Upon the Field, the genre-defying historical mystery film by Laura Laabs. Followed by a Q&A with Laabs. Admission is free, please register to attend.

After a bold act of political theater at the Reichstag, left-wing activist Tine flees Berlin for her hometown of Bad Kleinen, a sleepy village in the hinterlands of the former GDR. A university research team disrupts the peace when they unearth a well-preserved skeleton from the swamp, prompting Tine’s neighbors—old Communist stalwarts and young alt-rightists alike—to speculate about its origins. Was he the deserter sibling of two Wehrmacht soldiers from the village? Or the foreman of a local collective farm? Perhaps a secret service investigator hunting down Red Army Faction militants? As Tine becomes increasingly involved in the investigation, she finds herself careening through the past hundred years of German history.

Pulling from diverse cinematic and historical references—including 70s public television, socialist folk songs, and Walter Benjamin quotes—Red Stars Upon the Field offers Germany’s past and present as an inventive, high-energy patchwork of personal ambitions, local controversies, mass movements, and the secrets that undergird them all.

“Digging up the skeletons of 20th century German history and inviting them to a post-modern dance party, Red Stars Upon the Field is a boldly original genre-exploding work... full of witty touches, unpredictable narrative swerves and left-field style choices.” —Stephen Dalton, The Film Verdict, 02/08/2025

Red Stars Upon the Field world premiered at the 2025 Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis and was an official selection of the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film won Best Debut Film and Best Production Design at the 2026 German Film Critics Association Awards.

Rote Sterne überm Feld
Dir. Laura Laabs
Germany, 2024
133 min.
With Hannah Ehrlichmann, Jule Böwe, Hermann Beyer, Andreas Döhler, Jenny Schily

Laura Laabs was born in 1985 in East Berlin. She studied Political Science, Cultural Studies and Journalism in Berlin, Potsdam, and Paris, as well as Film Directing at Film University Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg. Her first documentary film Spinach and Sugar portrayed her Jewish grandmother Sibylle Gerstner, who was a painter, writer, and the founder of the legendary East German fashion magazine Sibylle. Laabs’ second film Volksbühne received the Emerging Talent Award at the Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt. In addition to making installations, music videos, and commercials, Laabs writes for academic and literary publications, such as the anthology Aufzeichnungen zu Frauen und Film (“Notes on Women and Film”, Schüren Verlag). She teaches workshops at Deutsche Kinemathek, Komische Oper Berlin, and Film University Konrad Wolf. As co-founder of the feminist film collective r.O.K.S. she developed the series Herstory which re-writes German literature classics from a female point of view.