Julian is a 12-year-old boy whose family is just scraping by in the Ruhr industrial region of Germany in the early 1960s . When his mother and younger sister go away for a while, he is left mostly alone in the apartment while his father works in the coal mine. He has to confront the confusing world of adults and older boys and the older girl next door on his own. Finally events build up and threaten to tear the family apart.
Cinematography
Winkelmann shoots the Ruhr like a graveyard of the German Dream.
Acting
Oscar Brose's face holds entire novels of confusion.
Director
Adolf Winkelmann
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Winkelmann, a celebrated documentarian, returned to his own Ruhr Valley childhood for this fiction debut — the coal mines, cramped apartments, and specific light are autobiographical territory.
The title 'Young Light' is bitterly ironic: Julian's 'light' is the glow of a miners' lamp, industrial and inherited, not natural or hopeful.
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