Title:
How Dare the Angel Sing  – the untold story of Eugen Engel and Grete Minde

Medium:
Documentary-Drama Film (concept)
Description:

After misogynists brutally execute aGrete Minde in the 17th century, her spirit lives on to see Eugen Engel, a Berlin Jew in the 1920s write an opera about her life. Tragically, the Nazis murger Eugen. His opera is rediscovered and premieres in 2022. 

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We seek investors and collaborators to help us develop this film. The pitch video includes interviews and B-roll we shot in Berlin, Magdeburg, and Tangermunde in Germany. Contact the producer: fiona @ owcom.com

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Synopsis

    ‘How Dare the Angel Sing’ is a documentary-drama about an historical woman seeking her rights in the 17th century, who is unjustly executed, whose spirit lives on through the centuries and eventually beholds an inspiring opera about her, composed by a Jew in 1930s Berlin, which unexpectedly premieres in 2022. However, her spirit becomes skeptical about the long overdue public sympathy for her.

   The woman, Grete Minde, in the early 1600s seeks to determine her own life and gain a small inheritance but misogynistic authorities accuse her of robbery and arson and brutally torture and execute her at the burning stake in 1619, leaving her infant son without care. In this film, Grete’s spirit is reawakened over the next centuries each time individual clergy and writers abuse or romanticize her as a woman of repute, for their own aims. Eventually she observes Eugen Engel, a Jew in 1930s Berlin, composing a beautiful opera that expresses her joy for life and her suffering as an outcast in her own community. In the opera, her character joins a travelling musical theater and plays an angel (and, of course, Engel’s name means “angel”). Grete feels Eugen understands her more than others. She, in turn, witnesses Eugen’s own suffering as an outcast as the Nazis rise to power, cause his family to flee, prevent the opera’s performance and finally murder Eugen in a death camp, incinerating him in their ovens.

   Eighty years later, Grete’s spirit is again alerted when Eugen’s descendants in San Francisco retrieve the opera score from family storage. Eventually 150 artists premiere this lost and very joyful yet tragic opera which ends with a dramatic conflagration, in Magdeburg in 2022, to great public acclaim. She – and art critics – see this and repeating performances as the triumph of art over the bigotry, mass murder and fear which tried to obliterate the composer. The opera’s artistic directors note a striking parallel between Grete and Eugen, as though Eugen was prescient of his own fate when composing the opera – he too to be destroyed by bigots and fire.

    While Grete’s spirit is glad for the overdue recognition of Eugen and his work, she becomes skeptical about critics who describe her as an iconic and extraordinary woman who stood up for women’s rights, and even those who make Eugen into a sort of artistic hero. Why? She witnesses current politics – increasing white power, chauvinism and anti-immigrant movements which typecast and dehumanize people to suppress them. She resists being typecast even to any small degree, whether for good or for evil, no difference, since this “othering” is what led to both her and Eugen’s unjust deaths.