The ice man

Movie
Original title	The ice man
Country of production	Germany , Italy , Austria
Publishing year	2017
length	96 minutes
Age rating	FSK 12 ; JMK 14
Rod
Director	Felix Randau
script	Felix Randau
production	Jan Kruger
music	Beat Solèr
camera	Jakub Bejnarowicz
cut	Vessela Martschewski
occupation
	Jürgen Vogel : Kelab (" Ötzi "); Susanne Wuest : Kisis; André Hennicke : Crane; Violetta Schurawlow : Mitar; Franco Nero : Ditob; Anna F .: Kulan; Sabin Tambrea : Tasar; Martin Augustin Schneider : Gosar; Paula Renzler : Rasop; Axel Stein : Gris;

The Ice Man is a German-Italian-Austrian adventure film by Felix Randau , which premiered on August 8, 2017 as part of the Locarno International Film Festival . The fictional story of the film is set in prehistoric times in the Neolithic Age and sheds light on the possible background to the death of Ötzi , who was found more than 5000 years later as a glacier mummy.

action

5300 years ago, during the late Neolithic in the Ötztal Alps , a clan settled near a stream. Goats and pigs kept domestic animals form the food, supplemented by trapping and hunting with a bow and arrow in the mountains. Furs provide warmth; cloth is also produced on a simple loom. Rituals provide cohesion to the group. At its center is the “Tineka”, a cult object in a small, very carefully crafted wooden box, which is reverently opened briefly and then closed again on several occasions.

While Kelab is hunting in the mountains, his settlement is attacked. Three men murder all residents, including Kelab's wife Kisis and his older son, who is fatally wounded and manages to save the baby. The attackers set fire to the huts in the village. From the linguistic utterances, which remain untranslated but can be interpreted through the context, it becomes clear that the men were only concerned with taking possession of the sanctuary of the community, the Tineka.

Kelab sees the settlement on fire from above. As he hurries back, he sees three men in the distance on the way to the mountains. Back in the valley he finds the corpses and can only perform the death ritual for his wife. He discovers that Tineka is missing. With the baby in his luggage and a goat on a leash, he chases the three men - and quickly meets a group that he believes are the robbery. Kelab strangles one of the men to death, hits the second man in the head with a stone, he remains lying down. At first he spares the third, tied up young man. You carry a lot of goods with you, but Kelab cannot find the Tineka in them. He frees the young man and lets him go. There is no linguistic exchange, not even with the liberated. Kelab scares him off.

The baby that Kelab put on to drink for the goat he was taking with him can later be left to a couple who live in isolation on higher ground and are probably childless because of the man's old age. With the consent of the man, the woman had previously tried to force Kelab to cohabit, but he refused. Here, too, communication is largely non-verbal. Language seems to be only rudimentary understandable in families. Emotional sounds and screams have to serve as a means of communication between all unfamiliar actors.

One of the Tineka's fleeing robbers dies in a crash; one of the other two is injured in the knee. Kelab is able to place both on a glacier field for the first time; However, before the fighting collision, he falls into a crevasse in which he is left behind, believed to be dead. After a while a rope will be let down for him. Back on the glacier plateau, he realizes that it comes from the young man he had previously rescued, who followed him to this point and is now taking his own path. Kelab can follow the tracks in the snow down to the next valley, where the two persecuted men live in tents with a wife and two children. He kills both, but then resists the possibility of complete revenge: he lets the woman and the two children of the killed live and wordlessly helps them with the cremation of the two corpses.

On the way back over the mountains, Kelab opens Tineka one last time: a polished dark agate , an early mirror, is attached to the box . Then he throws the box down. A little later Kelab is struck down with an arrow by that of the two older men, whom he had allegedly killed with a stone. This survived the attack and followed him unnoticed. Kelab, dying, rolls down a slope and remains in the twisted position in which he will be found thousands of years later.

background

A life story was devised around Ötzi in the film

The “Man from Tisenjoch”, soon after its discovery in September 1991, known worldwide under the nickname Ötzi , is considered the most important mummy find from the end of the Neolithic in Europe. His corpse was preserved as a freeze-dried mummy in the ice of the Similaun glacier in the Ötztal Alps , which is where the nickname or the name Gletschermann comes from. In addition, typical tools from the Neolithic Age, such as a bow and arrow and a copper hatchet, were found on his corpse, which, according to the latest analyzes, was obtained from ore from southern Tuscany. With this ax he had been able to fell trees. Ötzi wore a jacket made from goat and sheepskin.

Radiocarbon dating was used to determine the time of death of the man to be between 3359 and 3105 BC. Chr. Determined. In 2007, six years after an arrowhead was discovered on x-rays of the mummy , a conclusive scenario was published according to which Ötzi was probably killed by an arrow attack.

production

Rod

An originally planned film title was Iceman , the working title was Vengeance . The director was Felix Randau , who also wrote the screenplay and devised a fictional life story around Ötzi and tried to reconstruct his last days. Randau begins the film with a faded in text informing the viewer that the characters speak in an early Rhaetian language and that no translation is required to understand the story. It was a wise decision, according to Screen Daily’s Alan Hunter , because he believed that even the best of subtitles had destroyed the magic of this attempt to represent a Neolithic culture. Even if there is no dialogue that one can understand and the narrative itself is simple, says Hunter, one is interested in the convincing world that is portrayed in the film. Andrey Arnold notes in Die Presse that the absence of intelligible language also accentuates the sensuality of image and sound.

financing

The film was funded with 316,000 euros by the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern . The film received production funding of 350,000 euros from the Minister of State for Culture and Media , 250,000 euros from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and 560,000 euros from Business Location South Tyrol. In addition, the film received a distribution grant of 40,000 euros from the State Minister for Culture and Media, 40,000 euros from the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern and 30,000 euros from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

From an Austrian point of view, the State of Carinthia , Culture Department, Carinthia Film Commission funded the project with € 80,000.

occupation

Jürgen Vogel took over the role of Kelab, whose mummified corpse is to be found almost 5,300 years later in the Ötztal Alps and is given the name Ötzi by experts. Susanne Wuest plays his partner Kisis, who was killed in the attack. The young South Tyrolean actors Paula Renzler and Martin Augustin Schneider play Rasop, the daughter of the Stone Age man, and Gosar, the son of the rival tribal chief. The South Tyrolean Ann Birgit Höller plays the role of the old woman / midwife . André Hennicke , Franco Nero and Sabin Tambrea can also be seen in other roles .

Filming

The shooting took place between August 15 and October 1, 2016 in South Tyrol, Italy, in the Passeiertal , Schnalstal and Pfitschtal valleys , and thus the actual habitat and location of Ötzi, as well as on the Mölltal Glacier , Carinthia . Jakub Bejnarowicz acted as cameraman . Christian Horn from the Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater remarks that Bejnarowicz did not film the high mountains at the South Tyrolean film locations in romantic Heimatfilm motifs, but as what nature meant for the people of the Neolithic: a danger to life and limb. Symptomatic of this is a deliberately long tracking shot up a mountain slope, at the end of which Kelab looks like a fragile point in a rough wilderness, says Horn. Cinzia Cioffi designed the costumes .

publication

On August 8, 2017, the film celebrated its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival in the presence of the director, producer Jan Krüger and many of the actors, including leading actor Jürgen Vogel , where it was to be shown on the open-air screen in Piazza Grande but was shown in a cinema due to bad weather. From October 7, 2017, the film was shown at the Hamburg Film Festival , where it was nominated for the Art Cinema Award. The film was officially released in German cinemas on November 30, 2017. The Austrian premiere took place in Innsbruck, Vienna and Villach , among others , as part of the K3 film festival. A UK theatrical release was scheduled for July 27, 2018.

reception

Age rating

In Germany the film is FSK 12 . The statement of reasons for the release states: “The film sometimes contains quite drastic scenes of violence and killing, for example during the attack on the village (killing people with arrows and lances) or when Kelab kills the robbers. However, children and young people aged 12 and over are able to place these scenes in the context of the story. The figures also speak the ancient language Rhaetian, with no subtitles. This makes it easier for the audience to keep an emotional distance from what is happening. "

Reviews

In Screen Daily , Alan Hunter says Iceman looks impressive, with the snow-covered mountain trails shown, grueling ice storms, and tall peaks that convey the physical challenge of Kelab - especially a scene showing his fall into a crevasse that it emerged from seems to give no hope of salvation. The violence shown was appropriate to the era, according to Hunter, in which only the fittest survived. About the main actor Jürgen Vogel , Hunter says that in the role of the bitter and sad Kelab, he contributes to a large extent to the conviction of the film.

In the Austrian daily Die Presse , Andrey Arnold describes the result as a cross between Braveheart and The Revenant . The primordial power that emanates from the film is due to its aesthetics, and the force of the archaic natural scenery comes into its own. In general, the director likes to rely on brutal naturalistic immediacy effects, so Arnold, and mentions not only the oppressive narrowness of the crevasse, but also the rough brutality of a duel in the forest.

Tim Lindemann from epd Film thinks that the plot resembles that of a classic revenge western and explains: “A cameo of the legendary Django actor Franco Nero shows that the structural proximity to the western is quite intentional . The brutal revenge and survival story is highly entertaining, but also seems a little strange given the historically authentic claim of the film. The adventurous mixture of genre film and anthropological exploration will rather irritate purists of both camps. Everyone else can have a lot of fun on this furious journey through time. "

Use in school lessons

Vision Kino , an initiative for film and media education in schools, sees a possible use of film in the subjects of history, geography, social studies and ethics . Christian Horn writes about possible starting points for the educational work that the cinematic reconstruction of the early human way of life could stimulate the pupils to invent further conceivable variants of the real events in exposés or short stories. At the same time, the scenario portrayed in the film could initiate a conversation about the motive for revenge in literature and film as well as the ethical implications of vigilante justice.