Toyland (film)
2007 film by Jochen Alexander Freydank
Toyland (German: Spielzeugland) is a 2007 German short film directed and co-written by Jochen Alexander Freydank. It won the 2009 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.
Cast
Julia Jäger - Marianne Meißner
Cedric Eich - Heinrich Meißner
Tamay Bulut Öztavan - David Silberstein
Torsten Michaelis - Herr Silberstein
Claudia Hübschmann - Frau Silberstein
David C. Bunners - SS-Obersturmführer Falke
Gregor Weber - SS officer Werner
Jürgen Trott - Policeman
Klaus-Jürgen Steinmann - Blockwart
Heike W. Reichenwallner - neighbor
Matthias Paul - Gestapo officer
Synopsis
The film is set in Nazi Germany in 1942. An Aryan family, the Meißners, and a Jewish family, the Silbersteins, are neighbors and friends. The respective sons in each family, Heinrich Meißner and David Silberstein, discreetly take piano lessons together. The deportation of the Silbersteins to a concentration camp is imminent, and when Heinrich asks why they may have to go soon, Frau Meißner does not tell Heinrich the truth. She instead invents a story that the Silbersteins will go to a new place called "Toyland". Heinrich says that when the Silbersteins go, he wants to go with them, so that he can still be with his friend David, which terrifies Frau Meißner.
The morning the Silbersteins are taken away for deportation, Heinrich is found missing from his room. His mother, Marianne Meißner begins to search for Heinrich.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Toyland (film)” is 2007 film by Jochen Alexander Freydank. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Toyland, film and Jochen, not as a finished interpretation.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q325120. VIAF identifies the subject as 222432647. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2009 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toyland (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.