Durch diese Nacht sehe ich keinen einzigen Stern

Through This Night

The film portrays the final days of the most famous Czech authoress, Božena Nìmcová, who in the mid-19th century dared to live a life free of social constraints. The novelist of the legendary "Grandmother", which Kafka still recommended for his sisters to read, sits down one evening in 1861, exhausted and deathly ill, on her last journey, which is also a final attempt to flee a broken marriage, and formulates in her desperation three draughts of a letter to Vojtìch Náprstek, her last friend and patron, a letter which will never reach its intended recipient. These three draughts contain gaps and omissions, and yet they form a conclusive, self-contained portrayal of the way 19th century society revenged itself on a woman who dared to settle into a liberated life, and was doomed to fail.

Dagmar Knöpfel has been occupied with the subject of Božena Nìmcová since 1998. First she wrote a screenplay and then a stage version, which she directed herself at the Heilbronn municipal theatre in 2000. For Dagmar Knöpfel, Nìmcová is "an artist who was far beyond her time in the way she shaped her life and in the demands she placed on it. She is seen in the company of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Brigitte Reimann: women who wanted everything – family, self-realisation, free love – and who were all willing to pay a high price for it."

Source: 56. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (catalogue)