Potentially good story, but really bad tradecraft

Rating: 1/10 (26 August 2013)

One of the worst movies I've ever seen.
The majority of actors acted their role, instead of living it. This applied not only to the majority of the children, but also the adults. I could pick up the distance each actor had with their role from every character except the old Felder and the teacher. It's not enough to speak ("recite" would probably be appropriate speak) the words of 100 years ago, you have to use the proper intonation and body language, too. Watch any German movie of the 30s and you will see how far off these actors were.
What added to the ridicule was that the movie looked as if they had removed the colour from a colour movie. It was a new movie half-heartedly made look old. You can't just remove colour in post-production. When they made black-and-white movies in the 30s, they were playing with light and shades and they were producing a black-and-white movie from the time the scene was set up to the time the movie was cut to the time the movie made it into the cinema. If you just kill the colour in post-production you will have a movie made for colours that has then one of the elements that influenced the artistic work cut out by a computer. And that's how it looked.
Lastly, and here is where spoiler comes in, I was so disappointed that a vague and depth-less story actually ends without an ending. From a movie with such an unsophisticated story telling I would have expected an equally unsophisticated end. But the movie doesn't really give you an end. Instead it distracts by calling in WW1 and then letting you know that the tale-teller never has seen any one of the characters again after it. WW1 didn't contribute anything to the story, it should have ended with the teacher talking to the pastor.