The gamekeeper Sara finds a dead young woman in a forest in Brandenburg. The corpse shows bite marks. Sara suspects how some of the villagers will react to this news: It must have been a wolf. She wants to investigate the death together with the police.
The ARD film “Wolfsjagd” takes up a hotly debated topic: the spread of wild animals. Director Jakob Ziemnicki and author Thomas Szabó pack this into a multi-layered crime drama that is about much more than the fear of wolves. It can be seen this Saturday at 8:15 p.m.
The leading actress Maria Simon (“Polizeiruf 110”) plays game warden Sara Jahnke, who turned her back on her homeland for years and lived in Canada. Her daughter Julia stayed with her parents in Brandenburg. Life in the village was too narrow for Sara. Now she is back temporarily and is supposed to promptly “take” a she-wolf, as it is called in official German, i.e. kill her. The animal is said to have approached a kindergarten, presumably being fed by humans.
An outrageous suspicion
During her search for the she-wolf, Sara discovers a woman’s corpse. The dead woman is the Romanian seasonal worker Silvana (Romina Küper), who worked in a nearby meat factory. Sara’s father Robert Jahnke (Jörg Schüttauf) is the village police officer. When Commissioner Falk Laue (Jacob Matschenz) shows up from the city, the three of them first have to pull themselves together. Their common goal: to solve the case. It quickly becomes clear that Silvana was not killed by a wolf.
During their investigations, Sara and Falk also come across completely different crimes. Seasonal workers are forced into prostitution. The footage from a wildlife camera shows two of the young women running through the forest and being chased by men. An outrageous suspicion arises.
Along the way, Sara is confronted with her past. Bad experiences, which is why she once emigrated to Canada and even left her little daughter. Julia (Anna-Lena Schwing) is now an independent young woman who struggles with her mother. And somehow Julia seems to know more about the case than she says. Sara is sure: Man is worse than wolf.
And what does leading actress Maria Simon think? In the ARD interview she said: “We as humans have the task and opportunity to make ourselves aware of things. A wolf can’t do that. We are human beings, we have to understand what our responsibility is. A beast is a person who chooses to be one.”
