Little Rolf and his father Ludwig are playing a strange game.
They judge complete strangers by just looking at them, whether they are "good or bad".
A lady on the beach really doesn't offer the slightest starting point to decide in one direction or the other, as does an athletic man in swimming trunks.
But then the eye falls on a detail, a folded uniform jacket, next to it a cap.
The badge on it shows a skull and crossbones, which makes several things clear: the seemingly harmless bather on a beach in France is evil, at least according to his SS affiliation.
And he's dangerous for Rolf and Ludwig Hirsch, because they're in the south of France for a reason during the Second World War.
They are fleeing from the National Socialist regime, which at this point has just gripped half of Europe.
Hirsch father and son want to make their way across the Pyrenees to Spain and from there to Lisbon to get a ship to New York, where Rolf's mother is already safe.
Understanding grows step by step
In the film "The Path" Tobias Wiemann tells of one of the most famous routes to freedom from those years full of dramatic fates.
Walter Benjamin made it to Portbou, but died there.
Rolf and Ludwig also have the city just over the border as their destination.
They want to hire a guide to go over the mountains and are amazed when they realize that they are dealing with a girl who is hardly older than Rolf.
The Catalan Núria lost her parents in the Spanish Civil War, she speaks broken German (“Risk big too”) and sets strict rules.
Rolf really wants to bring someone else with him: a little dog named Adi, who, just because of his name, causes all sorts of misunderstandings, and who instinctively chases after a rabbit even when breathless silence is required because of a police patrol.
A mixture of childish adventure and historical drama
"The Path" is aimed at a young audience and, with a few appropriate twists in the screenplay by Rüdiger Bertram and Ytte-Merke Böhrnsen, soon ensures that Rolf and Núria fight their way through a magnificent landscape on their own, with dangerous surprises and dangers everywhere "Plot points" are lurking, i.e. small turning points in the story.
Luckily, the various task forces that are on the hunt for people who are fleeing don't do it too professionally, so that the children often find a way out of trouble.
Rolf always has Erich Kästner's "May 35" in his satchel, one of a series of utopian motifs that enrich "The Path".
Step by step, the understanding between the two children, who come from such different worlds, grows and yet soon become a good team.
They have to deal with partisans, some surprising truths are revealed about Núria's parents, and in the overall balance of good and bad people in the film, the bad guys tend to remain on the fringes and in the rank of batch characters, while some good ones are definitely beginning to become one exciting profile.
Finally, in a quiet minute, Núria occupies Rolf with a variant of a classic philosophical paradox: "All adults lie".
She means that in a sense that is only gradually dawning on the well-protected Rolf: lies can also have a protective function, only bad adults lie because they want to harm someone.
The audience of "The Path" can also feel well protected.
Compared to a classic like "Transit" by Anna Seghers, the good/evil balance in Tobias Wiemann's narrative universe is halfway tolerable, for every loss there is also good news, for understandable reasons young people want the truth about the persecution, but present it in a digestible form.
So "The Path" shows itself to be a mixture of childish adventure and historical drama, in which in the end the mixed ratios are clearly geared towards the protected consciousness of little Rolf: "What can't go well?" he asks innocently.
There's a whole history of film to answer that beyond The Path.