Schweinesand

Children's crime story set on Hamburg's Elbe beach: The summer holidays begin. Luc, Joa, Gunda, Jo and Feli discover that the boat they wanted to use to row across the Elbe has been stolen. Things get even worse: their classmate Alexa, whose rich parents care more about money than their child, disappears, and the kidnappers demand a quarter of a million marks in ransom. In 1979, Stephanie Grau founded the Zeppelin Theatre in Hamburg, for which she developed plays with children and for children. She also created a musical, a computer show for children and adults, a classical children's opera and much more. In the summer of 1994, she worked with children from her theatre school to write the story for a feature film, which was produced two years later on an extremely tight budget but with a great deal of commitment from everyone involved: a children's crime thriller about ‘too much money and too little love’. And about ‘how children's friendship can move mountains’. The attractive setting is Hamburg-Blankenese with its distinctive houses built on the hillside and countless stairs. The story has several literary models, starting with Astrid Lindgren's ‘Kalle Blomquist’, Erich Kästner's endearing hymns to childlike solidarity in ‘Emil and the Detectives’ and ‘The Flying Classroom’ to Uwe Timm's captivating young adult novel ‘The Treasure on Pagensand,’ which was probably the most obvious inspiration. What makes ‘Schweinesand’ special, however, is the starting point: it wasn't (exclusively) adults who came up with a story for children, but rather they developed it together with them, from the initial script idea to the acting performance. Not everything is sugar-coated; instead, emphasis is placed on the children resolving conflicts among themselves, which they are able to do independently and incorporate into their free.