A Year Ago in Winter

Eliane commissions a painter to make a portrait of her two children. What she wants is a family picture. The difficulty is that one of the children, her son Alexander, killed himself a year ago. The painter, Max, sits the daughter, Lilli, in front of him as his model. Lilli does not want the painting, and she does not want the image her mother means to hang on the wall. As the sittings go on Max starts asking and Lilli starts talking, and the thing nobody in the house has said for a year comes out: nobody knows why Alexander died. Caroline Link directs the German film; a hundred and twenty-nine minutes, with Karoline Herfurth as Lilli, Corinna Harfouch as the mother and Josef Bierbichler as the painter. It is adapted from Scott Campbell's novel. Herfurth took the Bavarian Film Award for best young actress for the part.