Der Fuchs (2022)

The introverted young soldier Franz Streitberger serves as a motorcycle courier in the Austrian Army when, after the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, he is drafted into the Wehrmacht. He finds an injured fox cub whose mother had died in a hunter’s trap. He cares for and looks after the fox as if it were his own child, and takes it with him to occupied France. Through this unusual friendship with the wild animal, his own past gradually catches up with him: he was the son of a mountain farmer, sent by his family for economic reasons to work as a farmhand for a wealthy farmer. After France has been occupied, Franz meets Marie, a young French woman, in Normandy and becomes friends with her. She gives him and his fox a place to stay. He protects her and her home from German soldiers being billeted there, and the two spend more and more time together, always with the fox. After a few days, however, Franz is ordered to report to the senior sergeant immediately and explain why, at the start of the attack on France, he ran into the forest instead of joining the unit setting out, as ordered. Franz does not reveal that he did so because of the fox. He narrowly escapes punishment for desertion, but has to serve ten days in the military prison. When he returns to Marie afterward, the fox is well. Marie tells Franz that she sent the draft of a letter he had been writing to his father for weeks, since she did not know whether he would return. Franz gets angry because he had not yet planned to send the letter and had been out of contact with his father for decades; besides, his father cannot read. The two part after an argument, and Franz returns to his unit with the fox and continues to raise it. When Franz’s unit is moved and he learns that they are not heading to his Austrian homeland but to the Eastern Front, he leaves the fox in the forest to protect it. The farewell is visibly painful for him, and he apologizes to the fox. After the end of the Second World War, in 1946, Franz returns to his parents’ house in the Pinzgau after 19 years away, to see his biological father. In the empty house, he finds a mourning card showing that his father died in 1941. However, alongside his own letter, which Marie had sent, he also finds notes from his father indicating that he had learned to read in the meantime and had begun writing a reply to him, the contents of which remain hidden from the viewer. Franz reads his father’s letter, moved to tears.