FILM
Polska / Niemcy / Holandia
FILM
The film’s action takes place in the summer of 1945. A makeshift orphanage is created for eight children liberated from the Gross-Rosen camp, set up in an abandoned palace deep in the woods. Their caretaker becomes Hanka, a twenty-year-old and also a former prisoner. After the horrors of the camp, the characters slowly begin to regain fragments of their lost childhood, but the nightmare soon returns. Camp wolfdogs roam the surrounding forests. Released by the SS before the liberation of Gross-Rosen, the starving and feral animals surround the palace in search of food. In the terrified children, the camp-bred instinct for survival awakens.
“It is a story about being infected with evil. About people who were reduced to the level of animals and who try to return to their human form,” says Adrian Panek, the film’s director and screenwriter.