SONNENSUCHER FEATURES an unusually rich plot, and on an epic scale. Lotte Lutz is a young orphan who runs away from an abusive employer to her older friend Emmi, who has been a woman of ill repute; the two women go to the Wismut mining complex, where Emmi meets up with an old flame, Jupp Koenig (played by Erwin Geschonneck), and Lutz, after a failed relation with a younger miner, is taken in by Franz Beier, a one-armed war veteran (played by GÜnter Simon). Beier dies in a mining accident near the end, leaving Lutz alone with their child; although Lutz really loves the Soviet officer Sergei (Viktor Avdyushko), whose life Beier helped save (thereby sacrificially atoning for his own Nazi war crimes), she must take leave from him at the film's close.

Sonnensucher offers one of the most complex generic mixes of all of Wolf's films. It has a documentary aspect, since its scriptwriters, Karl- Georg Egel and Paul Wiens, spent time researching their topic among the Wismut miners, and parts of the film were shot on location, including sequences shot in an unused mineshaft. Several characters, including those of Jupp Konig and of Josef Stein, were based on real individuals; others, most notably that of Lutz, were invented for dramaturgical purposes. Sonnensucher may be seen as a Gegenwartsfilm (film of the present), yet its view of the present is also strongly colored by historical memory; moreover, it also has elements of Western, melodrama, and Socialist Realist “production film.” Its production and reception history are similarly complicated; despite the director's agreeing to multiple revisions requested by the authorities, the film was Wolf's only film to be censored and shelved, purportedly due to the sensitivity of the topic of the Wismut uranium mines during the Cold War. The Wismut also inspired one of the most interesting censored novels of the GDR, Werner Braunig's epic production story Rummelplatz, which was, like the Rabbit Films, a victim of the Eleventh Plenum of 1965 and could not be published until 2007.