The Prize

Architect Alexander Beck has just won an architecture prize. He wants to modernize GDR building blocks in Thuringia. Alex travels to the heart of rural Eastern Germany where he grew up and where people remember him as Alex from the Free German Youth, a pro-GDR youth organization.
Alex is faced with a time in his life that he had successfully blocked out for years. He meets his highschool girlfriend, Nicole, and is forced to look back at his first teenage romance and the tragic demise of a great friendship. Slowly, Alex tries to grasp the events that occurred in the year 1988, over twenty years ago. 

DER PREIS is a film about guilt and responsibilities between friends. The protagonist Alexander represents a generation that set out into the new post-cold war world without ever stopping to look back - a generation that is slowly beginning to come of age by finally identifying, albeit ambivalently, with their roots.

2 DVDs: Elke Hauck's debut feature KARGER is available on DVD.