Kleine große Stimme (2015)

It is 1955. Nearly ten-year-old Benedikt is growing up with his grandparents in a small village in Lower Austria. He is the child of an Austrian woman and a Black US occupation soldier. His mother died when he was four, and he has never met his father. From a young age, he has to endure intolerance and racist hostility, not only from his peers but also from his grandfather, who was wounded by a US shell during the Second World War. Benedikt has a dream: he wants to go to the United States to look for his father. To make that happen, he wants to join the Vienna Boys’ Choir, which tours all over the world. He runs away and takes the train to Vienna. Although he is accepted into the choir because of his exceptionally clear, high voice, he encounters all kinds of resistance there, too. On the one hand, the conservative prefect, Hans Roschek, will not tolerate a “Negro” in the choir; on the other, Benedikt is targeted by Kurt, the choir’s oldest member, who fears Benedikt might take his soloist part from him. Benedikt finds emotional support in the Jewish choirmaster Max Goldberg and in Max’s father, Siegfried, whom he meets by chance. Siegfried is also searching for someone he loves: he misses his wife and still hopes to see her again one day, unaware that the Nazis shot her. The old man wants to help Benedikt and goes with him to the US headquarters to ask about Benedikt’s father. Since they leave behind a photograph showing his mother with his father, Jerry Delgado, who is from Alabama, learns of Benedikt. Meanwhile, Kurt has changed his attitude toward Benedikt. He no longer sees him as a rival and gives him the lead role in the Vienna Boys’ Choir’s important upcoming performance. In front of the assembled audience, Benedikt changes the program and sings his father’s song, which his mother used to sing to him. The concert is a great success, and it turns out that Jerry, Benedikt’s father, is in the audience, so the boy meets his father for the first time.