DAS SCHLECHTE FELD

A village through the ages. Ansfelden near Linz was an isolated place until a motorway was built right in front of it. In the middle of the village lies the filmmaker’s family farm, which was once a productive enterprise but today lies fallow. A personal chronicle of the farm’s decline also reveals the story of the village as a whole. During the Second World War the death march of concentration camp prisoners led through Ansfelden and on one of its fields a labour camp for prisoners of war was built. Never again would the field bear fruit.
Accompanying the film’s static and mostly deserted images of the place, a narrator recounts in a matter-of-fact tone the upheavals that have taken place in his homeland. Dunja Bialas