Karl Vouk

The film discusses the sub-bituminous coal mining process from tree cutting to the renaturation of open-pit mines. Lusatian villages and, with them, the Sorbian culture have been mined for nearly 100 years. 136 villages, 125 of them Sorbian-German, have disappeared since 1924. The film questions the equality of constitutional law and nature protection. A pond where thousands of European fire-bellied toads (Bombina bombina) have been moved serves as an allegory of the lost villages, while an acoustic metaphor for the missing balance between human rights and nature conservation could be found in alternating soundtracks – European fire-bellied toad vs. the background noise of an open-pit mine.