Welcome to the Club (2005)

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Movie
Original title Welcome to the club
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2005
length 98 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Holger Borggrefe
script Holger Borggrefe
Nicole Unger
production Get back to film production
music Matthias Koeninger
camera Janucz Reichenbach
cut Martina Mielenz
occupation

Willkommen im Club is a feature film by the German director Holger Borggrefe , who wrote the script together with the leading actress Nicole Unger . For the low-budget production, which follows the fate of three very different people while they were unemployed, filmmakers who were themselves unemployed at the time got together.

action

Using three different constellations, this film tells of people whose lives are thrown off course by the sudden loss of their job: Joachim ( Franz-Joseph Dieken ), who is married but separated from his wife and daughter , who hides his situation from his family and puts increasing pressure on his responsible recruiter; from the single mother Tonja ( Kasia Naumow ), who is "not entitled to benefits" and tries to keep herself and her son afloat with increasingly unpleasant mini jobs; and from the internship doctor Kerstin ( Nicole Unger ), who actually suffers the least need because she has a new job in prospect soon, but loses all of her self-confidence due to the unexpected dismissal.

Origin & location

Those involved in the film, who were unemployed at the time of the making, waived their fee so that the extremely low-budgeted film could be made. The film was shot in original locations and private apartments that were made available free of charge. The main location was the Friedrich-Ebert-Hof in Hamburg (a cooperative residential complex designed by the architect Friedrich Richard Ostermeyer ).

reception

Kino.de describes Willkommen im Club as "A dense, sometimes funny and always moving document of the times that life itself could have written."

For Reinhard Lüke from Film-Dienst, the film balances effortlessly on the fine line between tragedy and comedy. Welcome to the Club is "the bottom line is a comedy-like production shot with a mini DV camera from the gray area between low and no-budget, which is not without dramaturgical lengths, with acting performances of very different quality, but its strengths in an original atmosphere that alternates in a very peculiar way between sadness and laconically dry humor. "

Hans Schifferle from the SZ likes the humor in the portrayal of the characters: “The hidden comedy, the precise observation of absurdities in everyday life, works as a buffer. The film is best when it describes an existential tragic comedy, for example in the character of the strange man from the work-life, who appears stuffy but is surrounded by a touching sadness ... the feelgood syndrome that emerges towards the end with salvation the characters threatens to creep in, displeases, but with this rebuke you feel like a critic as a personnel manager who rejects a personable and thoroughly competent job seeker. "

Festivals

Willkommen im Club was premiered at the Max Ophüls Preis 2005 film festival, was the opening film at the 2005 Grenzland Film Festival in Selb and was screened at the Emden-Norderney International Film Festival in 2005 in the competition for the DGB Film Prize.

Web links

Press reviews and a. Welcome to the club at film-zeit.de

Individual evidence

  1. standing re film production: Welcome to the club. Press releases .
  2. standing re film production: Welcome to the club. Press releases .
  3. standing re film production: Welcome to the club. Press releases .
  4. Kino.de . Retrieved June 7, 2012.
  5. Reinhard Lüke: Welcome to the Club , in: Film-Dienst 22/2005, p. 39.
  6. Hans Schifferle: Trio with Tristesse. Holger Borggrefe's Hartz IV film 'Welcome to the Club' is heading straight for the catastrophe . Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 24, 2005.