How many of us truly know our own family history, let alone our national one?
Watching Red Stars Upon the Field (2025) can feel a lot like walking face-first into a whirlwind of chaos with only tidbits of contextual information to keep the audience following along. The film unapologetically traverses nearly a century of German history, staging the film in a grand narrative that threads together different time periods in a variety of genres, typefaces and aspect ratios.
It is an ambitious film that may sometimes feel exhausting or overloaded, especially when it leans into its navel-gazing intellectual pretension, but the boisterous nature of the film also captures a spirit of rebellion and a streak of desperation that reflects the earnest attempt of a filmmaker who has seemingly vowed to put it all on the line in her feature debut.
The film opens with our heroine Tine (Hannah Ehrlichmann) on the run after her successful political demonstration, replacing the rooftop German flags of the Reichstag with red banners, bringing national attention to her “art terrorist” group, the Aesthetic Left. She returns to her rural hometown of Bad Kleinen, a small East German village only for the locals to soon discover a mysterious skeleton in the local bog. Histories then collide as Tine searches for the truth behind the ancient body and instead uncovers unruly truths about both her community and her family’s personal history.
Red Stars Upon the FIeld oscillates wildly between genres, bringing disparate elements from the crime thriller and detective procedural to the surrealist comedy genres into a blend of pastiche references –– sometimes taking the form of fourth-wall breaks and meta-cultural callbacks. In other times, the film takes on the spectres of grief and laments the tragedy and loss which line the halls of Germany as it earnestly reflects on how the present is shaped by the past and how histories intersect.
Director Laura Laabs puts the activist of the modern day in conversation with her country’s lineage, and as the film progresses, increasingly finds the present struggles of Tine mirrored in the tangled web of historical secrets and the phantoms that roam within them. The film paints these figures as martyrs of their crusades, figures of struggle who are defined by their defeats rather than their victories. In that way, the film seemingly challenges the idea that history is written by the victors as it shows how even the skeletons buried in the bog can find their way to the surface and how the spirit of rebellion can ripple across space-time and emerge once again.
Laabs seems to remind us that neither life nor film can be ahistorical and that engaging with history does not mean merely studying or lamenting the past. It is less passive than that. Grasping with your place in the present and realising the potential future ramifications of your actions today. The tides of history are very much in our hands.
Red Stars Upon the Field screened on 2 October 2026 at Filmhouse as part of the German Film Festival.
Written by Adrian Ho, edited by Daryl Cheong.