Veteran defense attorney Konrad Biegler accepts the defense of a man accused of kidnapping a young girl. At the trial he must face the tenacious police inspector Peter Nadler.
Veteran defense attorney Konrad Biegler and tenacious police inspector Peter Nadler face off in the trial of a man accused of kidnapping a young girl. (Abridged version of Enemies: Against the Clock and Enemies: The Confession, focusing on the ins and outs of the judicial process.)
This is a story set in the distant past, in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years’ War. In the city of Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains, life is cheap, and the prevailing class divisions and interpersonal relations increasingly intense. The children are taken away from their parents by force, and when they return after many years, they seem to be strangers to them. Yet this is also a story set in modern times where people are still incapable of learning the lessons left for them by the previous generations of cruel divisions. The film is a cinematic experiment dealing with the beauty, fragility, and imperfection of human nature through archetypes and myths.