Erbsen auf halb 6

This film (English title: Peas at 5:30) came to Minneapolis, MN as part of the Talk Cinema (talkcinema.com) series. Director Lars Buechel was in attendance. Essentially, it's a fairy tale about two blind people who fall in love. Exquisite visuals--a field of yellow flowers, red sculptures on a seashore, a gorgeous new setting of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," expansive city vistas--show us what the lead characters can't see. Brilliant sound editing lets us hear what they hear--rain making music in water glasses, wind blowing curtains. The opening montage is a knockout. Emotionally, the film is a roller-coaster--Buechel packs a lot of grief and tension and hilarity and hope into two hours. When you wonder why the characters never seem to eat, for example, and start thinking that certain events in the film are a bit of a stretch, remember that it is a fairy tale (Buechel's description) and suspend your disbelief. It's worth it for this sensuous and moving experience. Almost all of it was shot in Germany, with a bleak East Germany playing the role of Russia.

The movie's love story between the blind-since-birth Lilly and the just-gone-blind Jakob is adorable, cute, lovely ... and totally predictable. Other characters like Lilly's mother and sister are only briefly shown as somewhat weird people whose behavior is mostly following clichés or otherwise leaves a lot of questions with the audience without exploring it further.

Fritzi Haberlandt's acting is superb. This is about the best thing about this movie.

Having worked in a social project with blind people, I could not help to think throughout the movie that the plot was quite flawed. Lilly walks around with her white stick in a neighborhood she has never been to before. She asks her friend and mother to just leave her alone at some desolate gas station/restaurant in the middle of rural Russia. "C'mon, get real!", I wanted to shout. Only a suicidal blind person would do that. And no decent person with eyesight, let alone her own mother, would do that to her.

The movie was trying to get the message across, that going blind is not the end of your life. That there are still many things you can enjoy, if you only make the effort to attend special training, re-organise your life, and learn to "see" the world in a different way. Agreed. What the movie completely fails to show is the reality that without a guide person a blind man or woman is completely lost outside his/her familiar surroundings.

The subject is very hard, its not easy to show what a blind people possible feel and think to see through the moviescreen. However one of the best German actor/producer Til Schweigert was the coproducer, I think this movie could be much more professional and deep. More tricks with the camera, and less humor. Just like an exam-piece of one of the highschools for directing scenes. Just an example:in the scenes and the house of the mother and the beach was a bit too much modern, and didnt fit into the picture how director described other part of Russia...But still very much liked it and recommend

8/10

To my mind this movie is a really outstanding production. The actors deliver superior performances, the script is wonderful, the pictures just beautiful and the music makes it to a masterpiece....

This movie is about a young director for stage plays who becomes blind due to a car accident. Of course he can't handle the situation, is confused and desperate. He meets this girl who is blind since her birth. She works for a rehab center and wants to help him to manage his life.... Somehow I don't wanna tell more: It turns into a road trip to Onega, Russia, where he wants to visit his mother who is going to die.

Definitely a must see movie!

Jakob, a young theater director in Hamburg of Icelandic descent, goes blind after having a serious car accident. He doesn't accept his fate and wants to kill himself, until he meets Lily who was born blind and who was sent to him by a rehabilitation center for the blind. Together they somewhat accidentally set off to Russia, where Jakob wants to visit his sick mother.

Jakob's origin is the one confusing thing in this movie - the way I figured, he must have grown up in Iceland because of his slight accent, to an Icelandic father and a German mother who was of Russian descent.

Even though I'm not a big fan of love stories and of German movies, I really liked this movie because it's a very unusual, strong kind of story. It's hard to describe it, you could say it's a very visual movie, though not in a visual sense. Since it's about being blind, you somewhat empathize with the characters and their way of seeing with all their other senses. Also, I watched it with the audio commentary for the visually impaired, just for fun ;) The dialog in this movie is as mediocre and clumsy as in any other German movie, but the physical acting is definitely brilliant! It's gotta be very hard playing a blind person, but those two actors are doing it perfectly with their gestures and their rigid gaze.

An affecting story, outstanding performances and an excellent, award-winning soundtrack make this in my opinion one of the best German movies ever. I was very touched by this, and I can definitely recommend it.