2023-04-16 13:28:13
EIt’s evening in Hanover. Elderly people sit in elegant wardrobes behind brightly cleaned window panes while eating. A fine shop. Chandeliers hang above them. People pass by on the street. You will be seen. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
It is evening in Hanover. Young blacks stand together. They wear kitchen uniforms. You speak German without an accent. It’s the dimly lit back of the fine shop. Nobody comes by. Without her there would be no food. Nobody sees her. And that’s just as well.
That was about a minute from the new “crime scene” case for the two federal police officers Thorsten Falke (Wotan Wilke Möhring) and Julia Grosz (Franziska Weisz). Brecht should come to mind. The quote of those in the light and those in the dark who remain invisible even though they are there just like the others. If it hasn’t occurred to you by then, which is reasonably impossible for reasonably empathetic, reasonably educated people.
Although we are just at the beginning of Falke’s odyssey through the basement of German society, into its engine room. Where the refugees are – there are no reliable figures – up to 600,000 people who live in Germany without papers. Doing work in the shadows that holders of German identity papers tend not to do, at least not for the money with which the undocumented are willing to work.
Cleaning at night, pouring concrete in building shells, chopping vegetables, washing dishes behind the wall that no gourmet wants to look behind. It’s a cliche minute. Admittedly (it doesn’t look any different behind the walls to the kitchen of pizzerias, for example). There are a few cliched minutes in “Verborgen”, the 17th investigation in ten years for the human understanding and milk drinker Falke.
Jon (Alois Moyo) and Hope (Sheri Hagen) are desperately looking for their son
Quelle: NDR/O-Young Kwon
Julia Drache and Sophia Ayissi Nsgue wrote the screenplay, Neelesha Barthel directed. Clichés could probably not be completely avoided. “Hidden” is a milieu study in the rather flimsy guise of a crime story. The pressure behind the story, which grabs you, pulls you along, is not small. There’s a lot of untold life in it. For example that of Alois Moyo. That’s Jon Makoni in Hidden. In the aforementioned clichéd minute, he and Falke walked past the windows of the chandelier restaurant.
Jon Makoni has been in Germany for decades. He had to get out of Zimbabwe because he was threatened with death when he did what in Germany any foreign infiltration conspiracy theorist is allowed to do on the street at any time, protected by hundreds of police. Alois Moyo had a similar odyssey as Jon did up until the set of Hidden. It reflects part of its history, its identity.
The high art of becoming invisible
Jon Makoni lives in a moldy basement shack, the walls look unhealthy. He went to college, Hope his wife went to college. In Germany they do shadow work. Jon hires himself out everywhere, Hope (Sheri Hagen) cleans and gives German tutoring to refugees. She masters it perfectly, but doesn’t speak it because she’s afraid, because she distrusts the state, which would deport her if it saw her, which doesn’t see her as a person but as the holder of a bureaucratic status. They have mastered the art of becoming invisible perfectly.
Jon wanders through the dark of the city in search of his son. He’s 17. His name’s Noah. Lately he’s been hanging out with other black boys who want to move on to England, the new promised land of the refugees. They cannot be accused of excessive consumption of news: the fact that the situation for undocumented people in Great Britain has deteriorated dramatically since Brexit at the latest does not bother them in their desperate flight.
Keeps the story of the Makonis at bay: Franziska Weisz as Julia Grosz
Quelle: NDR/O-Young Kwon
Anyway, Noah is gone. Another boy is dead. He was lying in the so-called pallet compartment of a truck on the way from Passau to England. This is the compartment where the suitcases go on the bus. For Europe’s smuggling industry, this is the latest craze for kidnapping people. The boy’s fingertips were ground off to make identification impossible. Falke and Grosz take over. Falcon meets a desperate Jon at the police station. It’s the beginning of an impossible friendship. Jon becomes Thorsten’s Cicerone through the parallel world. Nothing is easy. Neither is it unilateral. It goes, as “Verborgen” tells us between the few clichéd minutes, carefully and touchingly, right through the dilemmas of refugee policy.
Right in the middle of a dark field of burnt-out dreams, in which there are corrupt authorities and unscrupulous smugglers and unscrupulous employers, but good and bad are not so easy to tell apart. A transit area full of communicative trapdoors in which goodwill quickly reaches its limits.
For example, Thorsten Falke wants to do something, help, show gratitude. For risking his life as a decoy against the smugglers, Sam, one of Noah’s buddies. A tolerance. He could already achieve that, says Falke. Sam says what he should do with a Duldung. It doesn’t do him any good, it only emphasizes his status as an intermediate being. He doesn’t want to. Sam wants to be “where I can start my dreams”. England. “Hidden” occasionally makes you bite the remote control in desperation.
#anniversary #crime #scene #Wotan #Wilke #Möhring