In the name of my son
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | In the name of my son |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 2015 |
| length | 88 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 12 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Damir Lukačević |
| script | Damir Lukačević |
| production |
Ulrich Stiehm , Frank Kaminski , Marco Del Bianco |
| music | Ingo Ludwig Frenzel |
| camera | Jörg Widmer |
| cut | Uta Schmidt |
| occupation | |
| |
In the name of my son is a German TV film by Damir Lukačević from 2015 with Tobias Moretti in the leading role. The film is based on the true story of Ulrich Jahr, whose son was murdered in 1992 by Martin Ney , the so-called "mask man".
action
Two days before the Jansen family wanted to go on vacation to the USA in 1992 , Hannes, the older of the two sons, disappeared from his boarding school at night. Did the 13-year-old who failed math work run away for fear of his father's reaction? Business IT specialist Claus Jansen and his wife Heike cannot imagine that. You assume a violent crime. Commissioner Jan Schnabel is leading the investigation. Four weeks later, Hannes' body was found naked in a dune with hands tied behind his back . The parents have to carefully teach their younger son, the 6-year-old Sebastian, that his brother is dead. Claus does everything in his power to expedite the investigation of the crime. He hands out flyers and gives television interviews at the grave of the dead son. From his point of view, the fact that Commissioner Schnabel put the case aside is further evidence that the lead investigator is in league with the boarding school director and wants to cover up the matter. Claus is brought to trial for defamation and increasingly risks losing himself and his wife's love. For the sake of Heike, he gives up the search for the murderer. Two years later, another boy is kidnapped and murdered from a school camp. His body is also found naked in the sand. Shortly afterwards, Sebastian, now 9 years old, also drives his class to a school campus. During the night Sebastian gets scared and calls Claus, who picks him up the next morning. Sebastian tells about a masked, black-clad man who was seen in this school camp the night before. The Russian officer Vladimir Suvorov, who has applied for asylum in Germany and wants to become a private detective, offers Claus his help. Claus and Vladimir do research together and in old newspaper articles come across a "masked sex offender" who broke into school camps at night and abused at least seven boys. While Claus does nothing more than look for the murderer, Heike tries to keep the family together and starts working again as a teacher. The police arrest a suspect, but have to release Michael Strong soon because the suspicion has not been confirmed. Even Claus and Vladimir, who follow the trail of Strong, cannot prove his guilt.
Jump in time to the year 2001. A man is driving in a VW bus through the barren landscape of northern Germany. He observes children playing at a school camp. At night he goes into a room wearing a mask and carries a sleeping boy out. This boy is also found murdered. Only now is the public and the police becoming convinced that this is a serial offender. Claus was convinced of this from the start. The police published a phantom picture showing a tall, black man in a mask. The public calls him the "Black Mask Man". Commissioner Schnabel heads the special commission that is hunting down the murderer. In the meantime, 24 boys have reported who were abused by the mask man. Schnabel is under pressure. The press accuses the authorities of sloppiness. Claus is gripped by his hunting fever again. He shows Schnabel an anonymous letter that was sent to him and that places a heavy burden on a teacher. Schnabel, whom the unsolved cases have also not let go, trained as a profiler and gained experience with the FBI . He reveals to Claus that the masked man murders according to a scheme: every three years he kills a boy. In addition to the three boys in Germany whom he murdered in 1992, 1995 and 2001, he kidnapped and killed a boy from a tent camp in the Netherlands in 1998. But even the teacher's trail runs in the sand. Angry about this development, Claus files a complaint against the inspector. From now on, Claus spends every free minute in his garage, which has been converted into a data center, in which folder after folder is lined up, meticulously collecting facts and assumptions about the case, trying to put them together like pieces of a puzzle and arguing with the authorities, including the Minister of Justice of Lower Saxony. In 2004 the fifth boy was murdered, this time in France.
Jump in time to the year 2009. Sebastian moves out of his parents' house to study. Heike also leaves Claus a year later. Claus, who is unemployed, daydreams about Hannes, his dead son. He is following the case of the masked man on the Internet. There is a large community who think about who the mask man could be in forums. Claus argues with a user who calls himself "Coolboy" and claims to know who the masked man is because he was abused by him as a boy. Sebastian, who is now also interested in the case, visits his father. Together they watch Hannes' old Super 8 films. On one of the films, Sebastian recognizes an educator who showed Hannes how to build a boomerang. This lead leads to "Coolboy", who also spoke of an educator who showed him how to build a boomerang. "Coolboy" is the key track. It leads to the teacher Ralph Maeck. Despite all the arguments between Claus and Schnabel, the two men get closer for the first time. Schnabel allows Claus to be present when Maeck is arrested. In the early morning Maeck is arrested by Schnabel and a SEK unit. Claus leaves his car to look Maeck in the face. Claus visits Heike at her school and asks if she will come back to him. Heike is touched by Claus. He helps her tidy up at the school garden party and they hold hands. Claus rides his bike through the northern German countryside. He relaxes down a small hill. He disappears from the picture and no longer appears.
The real case
It is one of the most spectacular cases in German criminal history: “The Mask Man”, who kidnapped, abused and murdered children from school camps, boarding schools and tent camps. Behind the phantom is the educator Martin Ney , who has committed at least three murders and over 40 sexual offenses.
This unprecedented series of abuse began in northern Germany in 1992. A masked man broke into shelters, boarding schools, and summer camps to assault boys. Shortly afterwards, the first murder: In the spring of 1992, the then 21-year-old teacher Martin Ney took part in a seminar for holiday carers in a boarding school in Scheeßel, Lower Saxony . There he met 13-year-old Stefan Jahr. He returned on March 31, 1992, woke the sleeping boy and took him away. Martin Ney raped and strangled him on a dirt road and buried the body in the Verden dunes. The next murder happened three years later: Martin Ney kidnapped 8-year-old Dennis Rostel from a tent camp in Schleswig-Holstein. Two weeks later, his body was also found buried in a dune in Denmark. In 2001 - almost ten years after Stefan Jahr's murder - the “mask man” kidnapped 9-year-old Dennis Klein from a school camp. Weeks later, mushroom pickers found the boy's body in a forest.
The police followed up around 8,000 leads - in vain. Stefan's father Ulrich Jahr also supported the investigation. He hired a private detective, paid for DNA tests, distributed leaflets and was the first to speak of a serial killer. He invested almost 40,000 euros in hunting. He told the media: "I need to know who did it." Despite the best efforts of the police, almost twenty years passed before the perpetrator was finally convicted. The testimony of a previous abuse victim finally put the police on the right track. In April 2011, the now 40-year-old Ney made a confession. He admitted to murdering Stefan Jahr, Dennis Rostel and Dennis Klein and abusing about 40 other children. Ulrich Jahr was on the heels of his son's murderer for almost twenty years. On February 27, 2012, the "masked man" was sentenced to life imprisonment with preventive detention. Nine days after the verdict, Ulrich Jahr died of a heart attack while on a bike ride.
Background and differences from the real case
Shortly after Martin Ney's arrest, the screenwriter and director Damir Lukačević contacted Ulrich Jahr, who was immediately interested in a film adaptation of his case.
The script development was based on intensive research, during which Lukačević spoke to Ulrich Jahr as well as his wife Petra, his son Oliver and the investigative commissioners Martin Erftenbeck and Uwe Jordan, as well as the profiler Alexander Horn. Lukačević had also spoken to other parties involved: the Russian private detective, the Hamburg lawyer, the boarding school director of Stefan Jahr's boarding school in Scheeßel, as well as with Martin W., who appeared as a joint plaintiff in the trial against Martin Ney and whose testimony it is thanks to Martin Ney was convicted.
After Ulrich Jahr's death, the project was overseen by his son Oliver, who accepted the last version of the script and made a small cameo in the film as a police officer.
The shooting took place in March and April 2015 in Berlin, Brandenburg and Lower Saxony.
In contrast to the implementation in the film, Ulrich Jahr was not present when the perpetrator was caught.
The investigating commissioners Martin Erftenbeck and Uwe Jordan, as well as the case analyst Alexander Horn have been incorporated into the character of the commissioner Jan Schnabel played by Maxim Mehmet. The lawyer whom the father visits in the film is based on the criminal defense attorney Gerhard Strate , who represented Ulrich Jahr for a long time.
Reviews
“Even the start with a camera flight through the blowing snow creates a pull that pulls directly into the story. Since the plot spans two decades, the changes in fashion, hairstyles and technology also make the film a certain charm. Lukačević and cameraman Jörg Widmer never put this in the foreground, but the development of information technology in particular plays a major role in Jansen's research. Newspaper articles and TV clippings not only underline the authenticity of the events, but also ensure visual complexity. Lukačević's elliptical narrative style is also interesting. Again and again he leaves out important moments and limits himself to the scene afterwards. Finally, the beautiful music (Ingo Ludwig Frenzel) is reserved, but nonetheless present in an unobtrusive way and, like the entire film, emotional, but never pathetic. "
“There is a dark fascination with crime stories that trace real cases. You cannot simply dismiss what is presented to you as "a story". Even the few seconds in which the camera takes the point of view of the perpetrator, who breaks into the dormitory of a school camp to quietly grab a boy, while the sound track only contains the man's breathing and his heartbeat, are etched deeply into memory. The scene in which perplexed, depressed parents enter a child's room to tell their second son about the death of his older brother through clenched teeth is also unbearable. The fact that the crimes are not shown in the film and only hinted at in the scene mentioned - and even there only up to the kidnapping of the child - does not reduce the horror. This creates an impressive piece. But if you have children, you will run into your room right after the film to see if they are still there. "
“The narrative overpowering main character of“ In the Name of My Son ”is played with strength and energy by Tobias Moretti, but cinematically Damir Lukačević maintains a certain distance from this tragic figure. When the Russian private detective says goodbye to Jansen's life, it happens, for example, in a landscape shot: melancholy is in the air. Probably the most fascinating thing about this film: In the end, the feeling prevails without the representation drifting into too "feeling". Moretti speaks of a “meticulous world of spaces”. Perhaps that is why the film not only touches, but really takes you as a viewer with it (because you perceive it in a more complex way). And the fate of this man moves you more than you assume for a long time (even as a hardened critic). The shiver that runs down your spine at the last shot while reading the credits is not often felt in a television film. "
“Sometimes life seems like an unsolvable math problem with several unknowns. Claus Jansen expects 19 years to find a solution. He is looking for the stranger who kidnapped his son from bed one night at the boarding school, abused him, killed him and buried him in a dune. The gap that the murdered son leaves in the family becomes a permanent place of residence for the father, to which his wife Heike and the younger son soon no longer have access. Not an easy material for a Monday film on ZDF. Nevertheless, director and author Damir Lukačević managed to make an extremely worth seeing and important film; without soft focus, but always cautious and dignified. "
Awards
At its premiere at the Hamburg Film Festival in October 2015, the film received an honorable mention.
Web links
- On behalf of my son in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- In the name of my son at: ZDF - Presseportal. April 28, 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b ZDF press portal In the name of my son
- ^ Spiegel Life without Stefan
- ^ Tilmann P. Gangloff: Portrait of a possessed. Frankfurter Rundschau, accessed on May 3, 2016 .
- ↑ Matthias Hannemann: Nobody can give him back his son. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, accessed on May 2, 2016 .
- ^ Rainer Tittelbach: In the name of my son. Tittelbach.tv, accessed on April 8, 2016 .
- ↑ Heike Kunert: When no one believes children. The time, accessed May 1, 2016 .
- ↑ Hamburg Producer Award ( Memento from May 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive )