Serious topics in TV movies are often like the limp lettuce leaf on the burger. You need the culinary lightweight as a vehicle to bring greens to the people. Fiction and entertainment are under suspicion of irrelevance, even when it comes to environmental crime. One might think that where journalistic accuracy is required, fiction is overchallenged and underchallenged at the same time.
This is where the documentary like Jens Schanze's "La Buena Vida – The Good Life" shines, which tells of coal extraction in the opencast mine "El Cerrejón" in Colombia on the illegally cultivated territory of an indigenous people in large cinematic images. Or the Arte documentary "The Poison of the Mafia", which is about the business of illegally disposing of toxic waste. Eco-thrillers that succeed in balancing knowledge transfer, dramaturgy and touching characters in an interesting way can be searched for in the program with a magnifying glass.
"Blutholz", a film about illegal deforestation in the Transylvanian-Romanian Carpathians, manages the balance surprisingly well. Désirée Nosbusch as a Transylvanian Saxon, who works as a public prosecutor in Kronstadt/Brasov against the ubiquitous corruption in Romania and runs for mayor, and Król, who plays a drunken private investigator at the lowest point of his career, who is commissioned by a German wood processing company to search for a missing manager in the Carpathians, give their characters depth. They are not, as is often the case in eco-thrillers, cardboard comrades to illustrate the problem.
The film begins with scenes that seem familiar from dozens of crime thrillers with a touch of mystery. Bears chase a man through dense, foggy forests, dog handlers seem to let loose wolves to tear apart a naked, fleeing man, the manager of the timber company Sasse. But these first scenes are like a feint of Hannes Hubach's cinematography, a thought-provoking false trail or question mark for viewers.
A broken man returns
The Sasse Group sends high-minded but helpless lawyers to Brasov, including the young Katja Schöne (Alina Levshin). She is accompanied by Hans Schüssler (Król), one from here, who forty years ago smuggled Western goods with a school friend in communist-ruled Romania, betrayed them to the secret service Securitate, was tortured and ransomed by the Kohl government, found a professional home in the Bundeswehr and worked as a target investigator.
He is a broken man who now goes back to his home village for the first time and answers questions from the father (Peter Franke) of his friend, who has been missing since then. The third member of the friendship was Silvia Dancu (Nosbusch). She stayed, made a career in the judiciary after the fall of the Communists and now scores with "German values" in regional policy. Schüssler's teenage heartthrob.
In addition to the reappraisal of injustice, there is also the current topic. This is where it gets complex and confusing to some extent. Visual structuring is provided by the photographs of the Carpathian forests, the – still – largest contiguous primeval forest area in Europe. It's not an idyll. A brand new road built with EU funds cuts through the seclusion, drone footage shows how dense forest ends abruptly and turns into deforested hilltops.
The disappeared man wanted to save the forest
The disappeared manager was an expert in sustainability, ran a foundation with his wife (Anja Schneider) to save the forests and to establish a national park. Schüssler discovers a Roma village in which people died as a result of a landslide, finds hostility, false expert opinions and, with the road construction contractor Rednic (Geo Dobre), a dubious figure who reminds him that the old rope teams usually also form the new rope teams.
Although the scandals are now piling up, they are sticking to "bloodwood". On the one hand, this is due to the fact that hardly anyone seems to think about where all the wood that is offered as cheap furniture in this country comes from. But in addition to the play of Król and Nosbusch, it is also due to the screenplay by Alexander Buresch, with the collaboration of Sven Taddicken and based on an idea by producer Martin Lehwald. And it is due to the deliberate direction of Torsten C. Fischer, who also worked on the book.
One or the other violent villain with shooting irons in front of a gorge backdrop could have been dispensed with. But the suspense lasts until the end, and we also learn something about the actual illegal deforestation in the middle of Europe.
Blutholz will be shown on Monday, May 15, at 20:15 p.m. on ZDF.