Frühling - Wenn Kraniche fliegen (2018)

Rural home helper Katja Baumann fills in for farmer Schneidinger, who has broken his arm and cannot do all the necessary work on his farm himself. This time, Katja has to go to the sunflower field. There she notices a child who has just collapsed at the edge of the woods and is complaining of severe pain. Katja immediately takes the girl to the hospital, where she is diagnosed with poisoning. She also manages to find the parents of little Lea Krug, who are a family that has opted out of mainstream society. The father had been gathering mushrooms and accidentally poisoned his wife and child. Katja has Lea’s mother taken to the hospital as well, despite her vehement refusal. When Gregor Krug comes home and hears what happened, he immediately takes his family back home, because he wants nothing to do with hospitals or doctors and they are not insured. He follows a different way of life and wants to care for his family himself with the help of the forces of nature. During her brief time in the hospital, Lea meets a girl with leukemia whom she wants to help. The girl is firmly convinced she will get well again if she folds 1,000 paper cranes. So Lea tirelessly continues making paper cranes at home. She would love to play with other children, but her father teaches her himself, which regularly leads to problems with the authorities. He comes to trust Katja a little, and she stands by him when someone from the youth welfare office turns up at his door again. That is how she learns that the Krugs lost their first child—supposedly because both they themselves and conventional medicine had failed. Katja manages to convince the Krugs that they must not work through their personal problems, which stem from the death of their first daughter, in ways that disadvantage Lea. Moved by the family’s fate, Katja writes a letter to Mark, saying that they should never give up believing in miracles, just like the children, who in the end really do manage to make 1,000 cranes and let them “fly” out of the hospital window.