Fraulein: A Winter Fairy Tale (2016)

Description

Regina owns a hotel that has been closed for years in a small village in South Tyrol. At forty-one, unmarried and childless, sharp-tongued and sarcastic, Regina is what in German would be called a Fräulein—an unmarried woman, a spinster. Nothing seems to change in her monotonous days, spent caring for the elderly, playing scala quaranta with her friends Hanna and Nina, and looking after her white hen, Marilyn. Everything shifts one winter day, after a radio announcement warns of an approaching, powerful solar storm, when a mysterious tourist in his sixties named Walter Bonelli enters her life. Lost yet simple and wise, he arrives with the insistence on staying for a few days in the long-abandoned hotel. As the solar storm begins to show its first effects around the world—causing blackouts and a growing sense of unease among people—the tourist’s arrival in Regina’s life triggers a far deeper storm, one capable of radically transforming her existence.