Novemberkatzen (1986)

A village in northern Germany in the early 1950s, where the economic miracle has yet to catch up with the bleak postwar years. Single women live in the community house, far removed from bourgeois society. Gertrud lives there too with her three children, ever since her husband left to live with another woman. Eleven-year-old Ilse does much of the housework because her mother often spends days and nights with her boyfriend, until he leaves her too after learning that she is pregnant by him. Other children mock Ilse. A boy on the verge of adulthood knocks the head off her doll, while the neighbor boy Bruno takes advantage of her in the woodshed. When Ilse finds a November kitten at the rubbish dump—November kittens are born in the third litter, late in the year, and are often neglected or even killed—she has to move in with her grandmother because her mother forbids her to keep it in the house. On New Year’s Eve, her brothers dream of fancy cars, but Ilse only hopes that the baby in her mother’s belly will be a girl.