For this screenplay, the authors received a FFA grant in 2015. It is registered at the Writer’s Guild.

The Red Orchestra Synopsis

New York, 1948. JACK (22) is an aspiring journalist. When his father’s career at the state department is unexpectedly jeopardized he orders JACK to forget his former teacher MILDRED. JACK is upset. The American woman was their closest friend when his father worked for the US embassy in Nazi-Berlin. He decides to find out what happened and travels to the ravaged post-war city. He finds work and lodging with PAUL, an occupying officer and editor of the Observer, the paper of the American Forces.
PAUL lives in a grand old villa where JACK meets ANNA, a beautiful painter. She accompanies him to Mildred’s apartment and they see that she moved. An old neighbor refuses to recognize him and turns aggressive. Jack’s mother is shocked when she finds out that he’s in Berlin. She urges him to return home. Meanwhile, ANNA entangles herself in contradictions. JACK wonders if she’s a former Nazi. Their relationship swings back and forth between attraction and suspicion.
At the same time he finds out that Mildred had risked her life resisting Hitler. She was tortured by the Gestapo, guillotined and is defamed in post-war Germany as a traitor. He locates the former Nazi-prosecutor and wants to speak with him. He has to depend on ANNA to cross 130 miles through the perilous Soviet zone from Berlin to West Germany which is off limits to American civilians. He finds the prosecutor at a Neonazi rally inflaming the audience against the former resistance fighters. He describes himself as the Americans’ espionage expert and denounces survivors of the group as Soviet spies. When JACK confronts him, havoc breaks out in the hall. Unexpectedly, ANNA uses the confusion. She wants to shoot the judge but her gun jams. During JACK and ANNA’s flight two of Roeder’s bodyguards die.
JACK finds out that ANNA is Jewish. She managed to hide her identity from the Nazis. After her family was killed she partook in daring resistance-activities. She explains to him that PAUL, by order of the secret service, had made sure that his article about MILDRED would never be published. She suggests that he work with her in her artists‘ cabaret where he’d be able to express himself freely, exposing any truth he wants. In her show she confronts the post-war audience with the recent past. However, JACK insists on his hopeless plan to publish an article about Mildred. The American secret service arrests and interrogates him. Under a barrage of intimidation tactics, among them the threat that they would deliver ANNA to the Neonazis, they give JACK an ultimatum to collaborate with them. Against all obstacles JACK manages to publish his article and escapes the country with ANNA.

Related links
„Red Orchestra“ moods
„Red Orchestra“ storyboards
„Red Orchestra“ source interviews with survivors that this screenplay is based upon
More about Carola Stabe