Blood & Gold (5 Stars)

This is the fifth film in the Stuttgart Nights Festival.

There are three film festivals in Stuttgart each year, one large festival and two small festivals. When I get the catalogues I read the brief two-line overview of each film, but I don't read the full descriptions. I want to be surprised. Based on the brief description I have an idea which films I will like most, but there's always at least one film that stands out as a big surprise. That's "Blood & Gold" this year.

A German war film? Yawn... I might as well go to see it if I'm at the festival anyway. That was my attitude. And yet, within ten minutes I was sitting on the edge of my seat, excited by everything that happened.

The film takes place shortly before the end of World War Two. A highly decorated soldier known only as Heinrich has been arrested as a deserter. He's a highly decorated war hero, so he isn't scared of fighting a lost war. After six years of fighting he's come to the conclusion that the war is wrong.

He escapes and takes refuge in a village called Sonnenberg, close to Dresden. An SS commander is in the village looking for 31 gold bars which belonged to a Jewish citizen. The Jew and his family are dead, murdered by the local Nazis, but nobody knows where his gold is hidden.

What I like most about this film is its style. It has a grindhouse feeling to it, but it also has a lot of similarities with spaghetti westerns. It's a film that has to be seen to be believed.