what is the new Arte series worth?

“There are always those who are in their place. And there are those who never find it. There are always those who take everything. And those who lose everything…», announces in the preamble Open-air crime (in German, Lauchhammer – Tod in der Lausitz, which literally means “open sky – death in Lusatia”), German thriller in six episodes to discover this evening on Arte. marsh landscape, industrial wasteland as far as the eye can see, calamitous weather, humidity rate around 80%. A corpse is discovered, that of a young girl, flat stones carefully placed over her eyes. Birds started pecking his face. The buzzing of the flies says a lot about his condition.

An investigation, of course, is opened, carried out jointly by two cops that everything opposes, Inspector Briegand, a gruff native from the area who had fled to the city to find who-knows-what-elsewhere, and the commissioner Annalena Gottknecht, pretty, freshly graduated, whose meticulousness borders on neurosis. There are also young people who have fallen into drugs through idleness, dealers, ecologists fighting against the continued exploitation of open-pit coal mines, overwhelmed parents, alcoholic and submissive women, apartments of unfathomable decay and violent men. So many elements of narration tested a thousand times already. Still, we have to find out who killed Ramona.

So what makes this series interesting? Undoubtedly its very locality and its extraordinary decorations. Lower Lusatia is a region in eastern Germany, on the border with Poland, whose mining basin offers quasi-science-fiction landscapes. This backdrop of strange beauty serves as a setting for a rather banal investigation, but also as a framework for the painting of a former GDR whose bruises remain vivid, thirty years after the fall of the wall and the reunification of the ‘Germany. The men die while the titanic mines bridges devour the landscape. Added to this are unemployment, nostalgia, populism, the rise of nationalism…

From episode to episode, the investigation branches out. From episode to episode, the inventory is more edifying. Inspired by a previous TV movie by Till Franzen, German director, Open-air crime then becomes a different series, with undeniable qualities of raw filming and painful humanity. A landscape series in the vein of a True Detective, of one Trapped,of one Infiniti of one The Bridge.