May 1st - Heroes at work
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | May 1st - Heroes at work |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2008 |
| length | 94 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Carsten Ludwig , Jan-Christoph Glaser , Sven Taddicken , Jakob Ziemnicki |
| script | Carsten Ludwig, Michael Proehl , Oliver Ziegenbalg , Jakob Ziemnicki |
| production | Jon Handschin , Alexander Bickenbach , Christian Rohde |
| music | Christoph Blaser , Steffen Kahles , Dirk Dresselhaus , Rainer von Many |
| camera | Daniela Knapp , Daniel Möller , Kolja Raschke , David Schultz |
| cut | Carsten Eder , Jan-Christoph Glaser |
| occupation | |
| |
May 1st - Heroes at Work is a German episode film from 2008, to which four directors contributed. The opening film of the "Perspektive Deutsches Kino" series was May 1st - Heroes at work at the 2008 Berlinale .
action
Three episodes are interwoven in the film: “Uwe” is about a provincial police officer, “Ausflug” is about two young people from the small town and “Yavuz” is about an eleven-year-old Turk . Everyone will experience May 1st in Berlin-Kreuzberg .
Provincial police officer Uwe, who was sent to the demonstration in Berlin with his colleagues on May 1st, is betrayed by his wife at home. A visit to the brothel should give him other thoughts. He gets between the fronts and in the field of action of a water cannon and is injured in the nose.
Jacob and Pelle, two middle-class young people from Minden, go to Berlin in the hope of a riot, but wander there between the tourist program and street violence. An attempt to get hold of drugs creates greater difficulties for the two of them.
The young Turk Yavuz wants to grow up, prove his manhood and go out with his brother for the first time on May 1st. On his foray through the ensuing chaos, Yavuz meets the old left Harry, with whom he erects a street barricade. Harry develops protective instincts for the boy.
The end of the day brings them all together in the Kreuzberg Urbank Hospital .
History of origin
Pre-production
May 1st - Heroes at Work is a joint project of four directors produced by jet film and frisbee film, with three teams filming an episode independently of one another at the same time in the same location. The film producer Jon Handschin and his friends Alexander Bickenbach and Christian Rohde invited directors and authors to participate in the project. Director Sven Taddicken teamed up with Michael Proehl, Jakob Ziemnicki found his author in Oliver Ziegenbalg, and Carsten Ludwig developed his own story with his directing duo colleague Jan-Christoph Glaser.
All stories take place in the same 24 hours, from the morning of May 1st to the morning of May 2nd, with each story being 20 to 30 minutes long. Each story had to be played for five to eight minutes during the day in outdoor sets in Kreuzberg on May 1st. Each team had to stage these pictures during the actual demonstration day on May 1st, 2006 in Kreuzberg - right in the middle of the action, without isolation and without a filming permit. Only a small team was allowed to do this, consisting of a director, cameraman, actors, sound engineer and unit manager. Each story has at least five possible cliffhanger scenes . The stories follow the real course of the day, they are not mounted one after the other, but in parallel .
All stories end in the morning on May 2nd in the emergency room of the Urbank Hospital in Kreuzberg. In terms of content, there was only one requirement in addition to these formal rules: Every story must be about a protagonist who is under great personal pressure. Each figure hopes for a kind of valve for this pressure on May 1st, a way out of their own situation. And every single one of the protagonists is disappointed in their expectations in the end and experiences something completely new for themselves.
production
All scenes that take place during the Myfest and the demonstrations on May 1st were actually filmed on May 1st, 2006 using original motifs in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg. The rest of the film was shot separately in September and October 2006. Only the scenes with the police officer Uwe had to be filmed at the urging of the Berlin police authority at the Carnival of Cultures in early June 2006. A small re-shoot followed on May 1, 2007.
From the beginning of the project it was clear that it would not be a classic episode film. So three short films were not edited one after the other, as is the case with Germany in autumn or Germany 09 , but all three episodes were interwoven. This approach is more reminiscent of films like Magnolia or LA Crash . After each director had cut his own episode, all four directors went to the editing room with the film editor Carsten Eder and spent around five months there in spring and summer 2007. Every decision was made jointly and unanimously. The same solidarity-based procedure ran through the sound post-production and sound design, the development of the film music, to the post-processing of images. In the film you can find two pieces by Rainer von viel , which can also be found on his third album Kauz from 2008.
The film was co-produced by Hessischer Rundfunk and arte . The production costs were around 250,000 euros.
publication
The film was released in cinemas nationwide on April 30, 2008, and the DVD was released in November 2008. In addition to the film, there is an audio commentary by the four directors, the cut individual episodes and scenes, as well as an audio version.
Reviews
Christiane Peitz wrote in Der Tagesspiegel on April 30, 2008: “The episodes, staged in docufiction style, interwoven and enriched with a cool sound mix, focus less on street riots than on psycho stress, on coming-of-age and midlife. Crises. [...] A spiral of violence is set in motion, an insane trip whose vortex captures the images. [...] The film suffers more and more from the overdose of its explosive substances, all the main dramas and secondary tragedies, which give it a fatalistic twist. Especially since Pelle discovers a terrible truth in Jacob's video diary at dawn. The retrospective revelation becomes a murderous argument for everything that has happened so far. "
Susan Vahabzadeh judged in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on April 30, 2008 that the film shows a lot of lust for murder and other psychological quirks and the May riots as a “political adventure land without content” and as a “projection screen for a diffuse longing for new beginnings and change”. The individual stories "merged very organically". The characters are a bit “thick and overdramatized”, the dialogues don't always work that well. But the small pieces of mosaic combine to form a picture.
Detlef Kuhlbrodt wrote in Die Tageszeitung on April 30, 2008: “The Kreuzberg in this film is surprisingly authentic; the individual figures are drawn with respect and consistently well cast. Above all, Cemal Kubasi is impressed, his facial expressions very beautifully how things slowly work in little Yavuz when things happen that shake his previous worldview. We can argue about whether the great catastrophe that we are now hearing about was necessary. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Christiane Peitz: Mao is for warm beer drinkers. Der Tagesspiegel, April 30, 2009, accessed on August 8, 2010 .
- ↑ Susan Vahabzadeh: Beer is not revolutionary. (No longer available online.) Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 30, 2008, archived from the original on November 29, 2009 ; Retrieved November 16, 2009 .
- ↑ Detlef Kuhlbrodt: Initiation by barricade. The daily newspaper, April 30, 2009, accessed on August 8, 2010 .