German Movie Nights bring the best of contemporary German Cinema to NYC for free. This is hosted by the German Film Office. The films screen in German with English subtitles. Each screening will have a Q and A following the film with directors, actors, writers and more. On Thursday, September 17, 2026, the film Red Stars Upon The Field is showing.
Red Stars Upon the Field world premiered at the 2025 Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis and was an official selection of the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film won Best Debut Film and Best Production Design at the 2026 German Film Critics Association Awards.
"After a bold act of political theater at the Reichstag, left-wing activist Tine flees Berlin for her hometown of Bad Kleinen, a sleepy village in the hinterlands of the former GDR. A university research team disrupts the peace when they unearth a well-preserved skeleton from the swamp, prompting Tine's neighbors—old Communist stalwarts and young alt-rightists alike—to speculate about its origins. Was he the deserter sibling of two Wehrmacht soldiers from the village? Or the foreman of a local collective farm? Perhaps a secret service investigator hunting down Red Army Faction militants? As Tine becomes increasingly involved in the investigation, she finds herself careening through the past hundred years of German history.
Pulling from diverse cinematic and historical references—including 70s public television, socialist folk songs, and Walter Benjamin quotes—Red Stars Upon the Field offers Germany's past and present as an inventive, high-energy patchwork of personal ambitions, local controversies, mass movements, and the secrets that undergird them all."
Along with Laura Laabs' genre-defying historical mystery film, a Q&A with Laabs is planned for the Thursday night event scheduled for 7pm. The screening takes place at Goethe-Institut New York located at 30 Irving Place near Union Square.