Ventricular fibrillation (film)

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Movie
Original title Ventricular fibrillation
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2004
length 100 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Hendrik Hölzemann
script Hendrik Hölzemann
production Uschi Reich
music Blackmail ,
Lee Buddah
camera Lars Liebold ,
Grischa Schmitz
cut Patricia Rommel
occupation

Ventricular fibrillation (International Title: Off Beat) is a German love - drama from the year 2004 , not only Hendrik Hölzemanns film debut, but also his screenwriting thesis of the Ludwigsburg Film Academy is.

The film premiered on September 11, 2004 at the Toronto International Film Festival ; the German premiere took place at the 38th Hof International Film Festival in 2004. In the USA it was first seen on January 15, 2006 at the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival .

action

Paul Partenheimer, known as Crash by his colleagues, survived a tumor on his right cheek and a car accident in his childhood that left his parents dead and not only physical scars. Shaped by the events of his childhood, 20 years later he tries to save other people's lives as a paramedic . He and his colleague Fido experience the abysses and sufferings of society every day. At the same time, the introverted crash is haunted again and again by mysterious dreams in which u. a. a young woman can also be seen. During an assignment he meets November, a heavily pregnant woman whose boyfriend dies after a heroin overdose . Crash immediately realizes that she is the "woman of his dreams". The two quickly become a couple and Crash finally seems to blossom.

However, he is still confronted with borderline situations while working. So he can't dissuade a young girl from committing suicide by jumping off a high-rise. A homeless man dies in the hospital of undiagnosed hypoglycemia after Crash neglected to take the blood sugar test and covered up the mistake in the hospital.

When labor began in November, the couple rushed towards the hospital in the ambulance driven by Fido. They get off the road and have an accident. While the baby is still being born at the scene of the accident, Paul suffers a traumatic brain injury. Fido tries to reanimate him. The question of whether he will ultimately survive is answered with an audible beating heart in the final scene.

Reviews

"The fast-paced mixture of a mythical love story, intoxicating» coming-of-age «impressions and semi-documentary scenes from everyday medical life condenses into a stylishly narrated journey into the shadowy zones of German society", judges the film-dienst in its 3/2005 issue.

Jürgen Armbruster von Filmstarts criticized the fact that Hendrik Hölzemann was not allowed to direct the filming of the script he wrote during a seven-month stay in Australia, something that he had previously refrained from. He sees "writing potential" in Hölzemann and "even with" ventricular fibrillation "the basic idea cannot be denied a certain stimulus [...] but [...] the devil lies in the detail". So Armbruster lacks the sharpness of detail of the characters in the supporting roles, but at the same time he praises the main characters, who are "many times more difficultly drawn" and "excellently cast". In his opinion, as well as the lack of experience with directing, which Hölzemann had only had in three short films to date, in his opinion, a broken neck turned out to be, in particular that the film “almost completely lacks the real highlights. There are actually only two memorable scenes in the entire film ”and“ Ventricular fibrillation never gets really gripping ”.

Thomas Schlömer from Filmspiegel thought, "the dedication to the film is simply remarkable". The quality of the film lies in the "overdose of strokes of fate and drama [...] to present consistently [...]", which is why "the work of paramedics has seldom been portrayed as unheroically" as in "ventricular fibrillation". At the same time, Hölzemann succeeds in bringing "the protagonists' irrepressible desire for physical closeness [...] credibly and emotionally motivated" onto the screen. This is not least made possible by the good performance of the main actors Jessica Schwarz and Matthias Schweighöfer , whose work Schlömer highlights. He concludes with the conclusion that the film is a "symbol-overloaded self-discovery story with deficiencies in content, but of great devotion".

background

The real ambulance 01-83-02 is a much more modern vehicle and was used by employees of the Malteser emergency service and now by employees of the DRK Köln e. V. occupied. The guard shown in the film also does not correspond to the real fire station 1. Instead, the film was shot on fire station  6 of the Munich fire brigade and short scenes in the BRK main station in Munich in the Lehel district .

The sex scene from the film was posted on the Youporn porn internet portal under the title “Loving pregnant girl” and reached more visitors than the actual film.

Many details of the film are of autobiographical origin, including the illness of the main role Paul Partenheimer, because the director Hendrik Hölzemann also had a tumor on his face in his childhood, the operation of which left him with a scar. He also shares the fascination for skateboarding with his protagonist, whereby in addition to longboarding and snowboarding, he also does windsurfing . In addition, Hölzemann was able to fall back on his own experience when writing the screenplay, as he completed his community service as a paramedic in Cologne in order to then start studying medicine. "But when I was in the ambulance, I always found what people said was much more interesting than their illnesses," said Hölzemann. His experiences led to the fact that, according to him, there was “not a single invented character” in the film.

Matthias Schweighöfer had to learn to skateboard for the shooting . For the scenes that play in the halfpipe of the allotment garden , a construction was specially made in an allotment garden settlement in Oberschleißheim . The other recordings were shot in Cologne and Munich . The German Heart Center Munich and a clinic in Freising provided the space for the recordings in the emergency room . Since no rescue service could be induced to participate in the film, a fictional ambulance with its own emblem had to be invented.

Funding for the production came from the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern , the Filmförderungsanstalt Berlin Berlin and the Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen .

Awards

The German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating “valuable”.

Nominations

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Release certificate for ventricular fibrillation . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , September 2004 (PDF; test number: 99 501 K).
  2. a b c review , Filmspiegel , Thomas Schlömer
  3. ^ Ventricular fibrillation on the website of the Hof International Film Festival, accessed on October 26, 2012
  4. Start dates  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. according to the Internet Movie Database@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.imdb.de  
  5. film-dienst , 3/2005
  6. ^ Criticism , film releases , Jürgen Armbruster
  7. Wochenschau.TV Blog: More than 1 million suspenders saw Jessica Schwarz naked and (seemingly) pregnant ( memento of the original from May 14, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wochenschau.tv
  8. a b c d e f g h i production notes ( Memento from August 10, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), Dirk Jasper Filmlexikon
  9. Locations  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. according to the Internet Movie Database@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.imdb.de