Eher fliegen hier UFOs (2023)

The film begins in 2018. The Baumann family lives in Niersdorf in the Lower Rhine region. The village is slated to give way to open-cast lignite mining in the coming years, and its residents are to be given new homes in a newly built district elsewhere. The Baumanns want to stay as long as they can. They run their own bakery and hold out. Marita had promised her husband Franz, who died in 2015, that he would be buried here in his hometown, as he had wished. The years pass, and the growing financial strain caused by a dwindling number of customers becomes increasingly severe. Marita’s brother-in-law Claus and his wife Irene eventually decide to accept the offer to move to the new district. Marita takes part in protests against the open-cast mine, but eventually moves to the new district as well. After the bakery closes, she finds a new job delivering food for an Asian restaurant. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her beloved Carnival celebrations are canceled in 2020, and soon afterward Marita’s mother-in-law dies. Claus decides to bury his mother in the new cemetery and now also wants to have his father and his brother Franz reburied. This causes tensions within the family. When Marita then decides to have Franz reburied, she is told that, because of the phaseout of coal, the village no longer needs to give way after all. She tells Claus that Franz can stay in his old resting place, whereupon Claus accuses her of splitting up the family. Irene speaks with Marita once more and explains Claus’s motives: he wishes that no one else in the family should remain in a place where he was not allowed to stay. In the end, Franz is reburied in the cemetery in the new district, and Claus and Marita make up. Marita goes to old Niersdorf with her niece Nathalie, and there they secretly bury Franz’s urn beside a tree on the outskirts of the village, so that his final wish will still be fulfilled. She tells him that she will join him one day, and Nathalie will make sure of it. As they walk back through the deserted village, they see a Ukrainian refugee family moving into one of the houses there.