Der Zögling

Little Franz is a throwaway kid in the iron grip of the Austrian 1950s and 1960s. He lives through a youth that feels more like a Horror movie than Heidi: Forced child labor on farms. Violent abuse in borstals and foster homes of state and church. It's Oliver Twist in an Alpine Noir. The cinema version of the two autobiographical novels by Franz Josef Stangl, that unleashed the huge foster home scandal in 2008. 180.000 are known today as victims of this institutional violence. But keeping good hope and the will to fight and change these things made little Franz a survivor.