Nacht vor Augen

25-year-old German soldier David returns to his hometown in the Black Forest after a deployment in Afghanistan. But he comes back to his former life only in appearances. His family and his girlfriend soon are forced to recognize that David is plagued by an inner turmoil that above all gets expressed in relation to his 8-year-old half-brother. The borders between play and violence become blurred between the two, to the point that they slip out of control. In her debut film, Brigitte Bertele profiles a young man’s psychology with great precision, a man who landed in an existentially extreme situation as a soldier and as a result is futilely trying to cope with his surroundings. Bertele possesses the extraordinary talent to represent the invisible on screen. She manages to lay bare the psychic conditions and traumas of her protagonist and to show the spectator even unconscious mechanisms of suppression. At the same time Nacht vor Augen (Night Before Eyes) makes a contribution to the current discussion about the deployment of German soldiers in war zones, which – geographically far away from Germany – can indeed be isolated in their location, but not in their psychological proportions.
Ansgar Vogt