Wintertochter (2011)

Twelve-year-old Kattaka is looking forward to Christmas with her father, Daniel, and her heavily pregnant mother, Margarete. At the beginning of the film, the family goes to get a Christmas tree with Kattaka’s friend Knäcke and their neighbor, Lene Graumann. The 75-year-old neighbor is shown as a woman who talks little, smokes lots of cigarillos, often drives her old Barkas minibus, and fells the tree. During the gift-giving, Kattaka learns from a phone call that Daniel is not her biological father; her father is Alexej, a Russian sailor from Vladivostok. She also discovers that her parents had kept this not only from her, but from her real father as well. So disappointed and angry is she that she decides to go looking for her father without discussing it with her mother and stepfather. After finding out that her father works on a container ship in Szczecin, she wants to meet him as soon as possible. Their neighbor Lene offers to drive her there. Kattaka’s mother and stepfather agree to the trip when they realize that otherwise they might lose their daughter. After Lene and Kattaka have been traveling for several hours toward Szczecin in the Barkas, they discover at a police checkpoint that Knäcke has hidden in the car to help with the search. They arrive in Szczecin only to find that the ship is already on its way to Gdańsk. They decide to follow it. The farther east the three travel, the more the children notice that Lene has a secret connected to a key she wears on a necklace. Lene lost her home in Masuria and her parents during the Second World War. With the help of a young Pole, Waldek, and his grandfather, the three manage to see Alexej in Gdańsk. But Kattaka is too afraid to speak to him and runs away. Afterwards, Kattaka persuades Lene to go to Masuria. At the farm that Lene had to leave under dramatic circumstances in 1945, she is able to take the key off her necklace and put the past behind her. Toward the end of the film, Kattaka decides that she still wants to see her father after all. Back in Gdańsk, she meets him—he initially cannot believe he has a daughter—as well as her mother and stepfather, who have also arrived there in the meantime. While the two men argue, Margarete gives birth to a son in the medical room of the ship where Alexej works.