“Schwabenkinder”

Alpine and foreign cultures (), Jo Baier 109 min

In march, 1908, a young man wanders over the mountains to a Tyrolean valley. On the way he encounters a group of children, led by an old man, who are also wandering over the mountains – and this is no coincidence. The children are shabbily dressed and barely equipped for the difficult journey. The man is heading for an isolated farmhouse in the mountains. The young woman in the kitchen almost faints when she realizes who is standing before her: her brother Kaspar, who she thought was dead. Twenty years ago, he had been forced to leave the farm, when he was not even ten years old. Along with many other poor children from the mountain farms, he had been send to Swabia for the summer to work as cheapest labour for the farmers there. He never returned. His family was told that he was dead, says his sister. He has come so far, says Kaspar, to see his father once again. The joy of the reunion, however, is shortlived, for his father is dying. Kaspar has to sit at his bedside and tell him for the first time what it meant for him, all those years ago, to be sent to Swabia, how unbearably hard it was for him and the other children and how they suffered as “Swabian children”….After talking for days and nights, the father dies in his son´s arms. Yet they have been reconciled…..