The Rose Garden

The film is set in Germany. At an airport an old man attacks another old man. The attacker is arrested at once. Through the questioning he does not say a word. A public defender is assigned to him. The lawyer is called Gabriele. At first the case looks straightforward. Then the lawyer sees the number on his arm. The man survived a concentration camp. His name is Aaron Reichenbach. The man he attacked is a former German officer. The lawyer begins to look into the past. Twenty Jewish children were killed in the last days of the war. The case follows the trail of that crime. Liv Ullmann and Maximilian Schell take the leads, with Peter Fonda also in the cast, in Fons Rademakers’s American film of 1989.