"Lea" is a love story between two outsiders: Lea Gahut (21), a speech-impaired girl from a rural village in East Slovakia and Herbert Strehlow(51), a recluse who lives in an old farmouse at the edge of the Bavarian forest, where he restores antique furniture. In 1991 Strehlow comes to Slovakia to settle a property claim. There he discovers Lea who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife, Sophie.

 

Strehlow persuades Lea's parents to sell her for DM50.000, takes her to Germany against her will and forces her to marry him in Denmark. At the age of seven Lea witnessed the violent death of her mother at her father's hand: a trauma from which she never recovers. She stops speaking after this incident. She withdraws into a world of dreams and visions, in which her mother is still alive, and devotes herself entirely to this relationship - writing her poems and letters every day. This imaginary world also serves as her protective shell which Strehlow tries, in vain, to penetrate. Lea hates Strehlow. She is wary of the deep, irreconcilable split in his personality and she fears his violent outbursts - that remind her of her father. We are confronted with a relationship that appears to be doomed from the outset.

 

Gradually, however, changes begin to occur as each slowly discovers the secretive inner core of the other; discovers that they are linked by a fragile and lingering bond with the past. For Lea, the painful death of her mother - for Strehlow, the sudden death of his wife. Shattered by this tragic event, Strehlow spends the next twenty years in the French Foreign Legion; and experience that changes him so radically that he is unable to return to "normal" life. Cracks begin to appear in Strehlow's tough armour. He begins to reveal feelings and emotions that attrach Lea's attention and, slowly, her interest. We observe two uncommon people, at the edge of silence, as they gradually learn to speak a common "language." Their past - the undead: paves the bridge upon which they ultimately meet.