Das Blaue vom Himmel (2011)

The film is set in January 1991 in Germany and Latvia. Frequent flashbacks show Marga’s youth in the 1930s and 1940s in Jūrmala and Riga. Sofia and her husband live in Berlin; Sofia’s mother, Marga, lives in a nursing home in Bonn. Just as Sofia is producing a report for SFB about the latest events in Latvia during the Singing Revolution, she receives a call saying that her mother has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Wuppertal. She learns that Marga took a taxi to her former home in Wuppertal, broke in, and smashed porcelain. Sofia drives to Wuppertal the next morning. At the hospital, she is initially bewildered to find her mother restrained in bed. She has to face the fact that her mother has dementia and is aggressive; Marga no longer recognizes her daughter, either. Sofia takes her mother out of the hospital and drives with her to her former family home. The owner gives her a small photo album showing nude photographs of a young woman, whom Sofia assumes is her mother, and Sofia’s father, Juris, as a young man. The owner had found the album in the attic of the old house during renovations. When confronted with the photos, Marga screams and bursts into tears. As time passes, it becomes increasingly clear that Marga is consumed by fear and a deep longing for her husband, Juris, who has been dead for years. She becomes more and more lost in the past and suddenly, like a child, demands affection. Sofia had had little contact with her mother for a long time and feels overwhelmed by having to care for her. When Sofia arrives in Berlin with Marga, she finds photos from her mother’s past in Latvia in Marga’s bag. Her mother had always claimed there were no photos from that time. The following day, Marga has torn all the photos to pieces. Against her husband’s wishes—he is worried about the unrest in Riga—Sofia travels to Latvia with her mother. She wants to see the place where Marga grew up as a Baltic German and married Juris. They go to Jūrmala to visit Osvalds, who had run a photography studio with Juris. Marga recognizes him, even though she has not seen him for about 50 years. From him, Sofia learns the truth about Marga’s past and her own, which the viewer discovers gradually through the flashbacks: Juris was married to Marga, but he was in love with Ieva, a Latvian woman. He had an affair with her; she is the woman in the old nude photographs. When Marga wanted to flee to Germany ahead of the advancing Russian troops, movers found the photo album while clearing out the house, and that was how she discovered the secret affair. Since Juris got off the train to Germany at the last moment, Marga stayed in Latvia too. While Juris then lived with Ieva, Marga moved in with Osvalds. Deeply hurt, she wanted revenge on Ieva. To do this, she obtained some leaflets that Osvalds had secretly printed to call for resistance against the Russian troops. Marga hid the leaflets in curtains and took them to Ieva at her parents’ laundry. She then denounced Ieva to the Russian occupying forces, who deported Ieva and her mother to a gulag in Siberia. Marga wanted to watch Ieva being taken away on a train. Afraid that soldiers would spot her, she lay down beneath the departing train at the last moment and had to listen to the prisoners’ screams. Sofia also learns from Osvalds that Ieva, not Marga, is her mother. After Ieva’s deportation, Juris returned to Marga with his daughter, and Marga took Sofia in as her own child. But she was unable to develop maternal feelings for Sofia; at first, she even tried to kill the toddler by placing her naked by an open window. Sofia and Osvalds find Marga scantily dressed in the freezing cold, lying beneath a truck outside Osvalds’s house. Confused, she is under the truck just as she had once been beneath the train that carried Ieva away. Sofia manages to locate Ieva in Riga after Osvalds tells her that Ieva returned to Riga after twelve years in captivity and still lives there today. Confused by the unexpected encounter with Sofia, whom she had believed dead, Ieva runs away. Because of the unrest in the country, Osvalds cannot call a doctor, and Marga’s condition worsens by the hour. Shortly before Marga dies, Ieva visits her. After Marga tells her that Juris loved her, Ieva, she leaves the room without a word. After Marga’s death, Sofia finds Ieva on the beach. Sofia shows her a photo of her son and makes it clear to Ieva that he is her grandson. Ieva smiles quietly, and the two look out to sea together.