Manila (2000)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Manila
Country of production Germany
original language German , English
Publishing year 2000
length 115 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Romuald Karmakar
script Bodo Kirchhoff
Romuald Karmakar
production Romuald Karmakar
Renate Seefeldt
Gerd Huber
Hanno Huth
music Ric Manrique junior
Stefan Broedner
camera Fred Schuler
cut Peter Przygodda
occupation

in alphabetic order:

Manila is a German ensemble feature film directed by Romuald Karmakar in late 1998 .

action

"We still have to find a Filipino rat ... and off we go," announces the slightly blasé representative of a German airline, Jochen Osterfeld, and tries to put off a colorful group of passengers who are now temporarily stuck in the terminal of Manila International Airport and open waiting for their flight to Frankfurt am Main. The passengers are like a panopticon: sun-hungry and bathing enthusiasts, business people, sex tourists and individualistic lone fighters. They have been waiting for hours to finally get on board. If the situation is initially relaxed to cheerful, then in the course of the never-ending delays, the first aggressions begin to arise until one or the other's nerves are finally flat. The moody pack is kept in check with free drinks, souvenir photos such as holiday experiences are passed around among the stranded.

The passengers are a mixed bunch: There are, for example, the two slightly chubby Rudi and Herbert, who are generally considered sex tourists, or the young US journalist with German roots Elisabeth, who has been driven by her life's topic “Germans abroad” for two decades. There is the careworn, East German teacher couple Regine and Knut Görler, who tries to portray themselves as educated citizens and who exhaustively reports on the physical strains of traveling. Or the German dropout Walter with his Filipino wife Maribel. Both run a brothel in Manila. Finally, there is an entertainer of the very old style: Eddi Arent knows how to keep a “troop” happy if the general mood threatens to change. Soon, however, that doesn't help either, and this mixture of human abysses, which is rich in social explosives, threatens to implode and then explode at Manila airport.

Production notes

Manila was created between October 29 and December 14, 1998 in Manila, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Bad Oldesloe.

Rolf Zehetbauer designed the film structures . He was primarily responsible for the central location, the departure hall of the Manila International Airport, which he recreated in a warehouse in Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein.

The musical template came from Giuseppe Verdi .

Awards

Manila was nominated for several film awards and received it in the following categories:

Reviews

Manila received mixed reviews. Below are several examples:

Georg Seeßlen particularly valued the “composition of space and time” in this film, but on the other hand stated his problem “with Kirchhoff's texts, with his construction of people. Either he goes too far in his denunciation and shows intellectual arrogance towards his petty bourgeois heroes ... Or he does not go far enough because he suppresses the grotesque of the class himself ... "

In the Frankfurter Rundschau of June 28, 2000 it can be read that Karmakar loves risk and with every film he has made, he has always tried something new. In this ensemble piece, there are episodes "that do not become stories, fleeting encounters that do not have to make sense, neither doctrinal pieces nor purifications are on the program."

Hans Günther Pflaum located in the film, as the headline in his criticism in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of June 29, 2000, was a “purgatory of embarrassments” and saw a “travel film” in Manila , but it only begins at the moment when the external movement has come to a standstill ".

On June 27, 2000, Spiegel online registered "not a flattering portrait of a travel-mad nation" and found that the Germans in Karmakar's film world were consistently "stuffy, chubby and uptight". To make matters worse, the “little stories” would bore you in the long run.

The Berliner Morgenpost saw a settlement with “Germanness and sex tourism” in Manila , admitted in its criticism of June 29, 2000 Karmakar a “sure hand for excellent actor management” and praised the fact that the film “largely got by without a moral index finger”. At the same time, however, the critic found that the film was not “unfree from bold slogans” and “one or the other episode laden with clichés or even dispensable”.

In Die Welt of June 28, 2000, Hanns-Georg Rodek came to the conclusion that the film was irritating and that it was “relentless” in its statement.

Individual evidence

  1. Complete epd review on filmportal.de

Web links