Gritta of the Rats' Castle

Freya Klier was initially unenthusiastic when her eleven-year-old daughter Nadja Klier was asked to play the title role in this movie and thought she might be overwhelmed by the expected workload. But her daughter rose to the challenge with aplomb and in retrospect her mother has no doubt that it was the dissident environment in which Nadja thrived so well and gained more self-confidence in this free, colorful and anti-authoritarian scene than many of her peers. Despite all the hardships, Nadja really enjoyed the film work, the sets, the spotlights, the make-up. And she even put up with the scratchy convent dresses, which really made her feel the discomfort of the gloomy abbey she was put in after her free life in a run-down castle. And she also had fun with the three hundred or so brightly colored rats that were bred especially for the film in the Berlin zoo and trained over a long training period in Magdeburg's "Institute for the Control of Vertebrates Harmful to Health". The intrepid girl always had these lively rodents in the pockets of her tracksuit.