Never Look Away

The GDR in the 1950s: The highly talented painter Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) is on his way to becoming an important artist of Socialist Realism. At the Dresden Art Academy, he meets the gifted fashion student Ellie (Paula Beer). It is love at first sight for both of them - and soon Kurt moves into Ellie's family's upper-class villa as a lodger. Kurt has no idea that her father, the respected gynecologist Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), had to go into hiding in the workers' and farmers' state under a false name because of his Nazi crimes. Nor does he know that their paths have crossed before: his opportunistic future father-in-law is responsible for the death of Kurt's beloved aunt (Saskia Rosendahl), who was a victim of euthanasia during the Third Reich. The memory of his fun-loving and art-loving relative accompanies Kurt throughout his life. When he flees to West Germany with Ellie and studies at the Dusseldorf Academy in the 1960s, Kurt unconsciously begins to process his biography. Without knowing it, he creates an unusual painting that establishes an undiscovered connection between perpetrator and victim. For him, it is a liberation from a deep creative crisis and the beginning of finding his own expression.