Die Reise nach Sundevit

Tim, the son of a lighthouse keeper, meets a group of Free German Youth Pioneers in the Baltic dunes. They invite him to spend the rest of the summer holidays with them at Cape Sundevit. But Tim has to run an errand first, which takes longer than expected because people keep asking him for help. He misses the group’s departure, so the ten-year-old boy sets out alone, on foot and hitchhiking, hoping to catch up with his new friends before the ferry sails … Made three years before Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, USA, 1969) under the vast skies of the Darss peninsula, this was a road movie “avant la lettre”. Permanent departures are a central subject in this film version of a children’s book whose author was a cabin boy in his youth. A bicycle, a cart, a car, a tank and a motorcycle are the vehicles of constant acceleration here, transporting the young hero from the realm of necessity (“you should always help if you can”) to the realm of freedom. But what the enthusiastic young “Treasure Island” readers encounter there is not gleaming “pieces of eight” but rather gestures of friendly solidarity.