Friesennot

Friesennot
Directed by	Peter Hagen
Produced by	Alfred Bittins (line producer) Dr. Scheunemann (line producer) Hermann Schmidt (producer)
Written by	Werner Kortwich (writer)
Starring	See below
Music by	Walter Gronostay
Cinematography	Sepp Allgeier
Edited by	W. Becker
Release date	1935
Running time	97 minutes (Germany)
Country	Nazi Germany
Language	German

Friesennot is a 1935 German film directed by Peter Hagen.

The film is also known as Dorf im roten Sturm (German reissue title) and Frisions in Distress (USA).

Communist authorities are making life as difficult as possible for a village of Volga Germans in the Soviet Union, with taxes and other oppression. When Mette, a half-Russian, half-Frisian woman, becomes the girlfriend of Kommissar Tschernoff, the Frisians murder her and throw her body in the swamp. Open violence breaks out, and the Red Army soldiers are all killed; the villagers set fire to their village and flee.

Despite Nazi hostility to religion, a cynical piece of anti-Communist propaganda depicts the Communists as posting obscene anti-religious posters, and the Frisians as piously declaring that all authority comes from God.

The portrayal of Cherkov does not conform to the heavy-handed depiction of Communists as brutal and murderous in such films as Flüchtlinge; he is truly and passionately in love with Mette, and only with her death does he unleash his soldiers. A villager objects to the affair on the grounds that even though her mother was Russian, her father's Frisian blood "outweighs" foreign blood, and therefore she must not throw herself at a foreigner. Her murder is presented as in accordance with the Nazi principle of "race defilement."

After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939, the film was banned; in 1941, after the invasion of Russia, it was reissued under its new title.

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