Anger (TV movie)

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Movie
Original title Anger
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2006
length 90 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
JMK 12
Rod
Director Züli Aladağ
script Max Eipp
production Christian Granderath
music Johannes Kobilke
camera Wojciech Szepel
cut Andreas Wodraschke ,
Dora Vajda
occupation

Wut (German alternative title: Can ) is a German television film by director Züli Aladağ from 2005 , which deals with intercultural competence and juvenile delinquency among people of Turkish origin in Germany .

The award-winning drama caused immediately before the premiere in September 2006 a controversy about violence in the media . The film, intended by Westdeutscher Rundfunk as a contribution to integration, was originally supposed to be shown on September 27, 2006 (Wednesday) during prime time with a subsequent discussion program on Erste , but was postponed to late-night programming on September 29 (Friday). This program change caused a stir in the German media.

action

The film drama takes place in Berlin-Tempelhof and the escalation describes a conflict between a family of educated middle class and a Turkish-born young people from modest backgrounds. In addition, the film addresses the failure of communication both within the German and the Turkish family.

The budding literature professor Simon Laub and his wife Christa, real estate agent, enable their son Felix a life of prosperity and education. Felix is ​​a talented cello player. Can, the leader of a street gang, from whom he regularly buys marijuana, belongs to the circle of acquaintances of the sensitive and aesthetically inclined bourgeois son . As the son of a greengrocer, the young German-Turkish man is less well off and is sometimes jealous and envious of his wealthy friend. When Cans gang Felix "takes off" his new branded sneakers and the boy comes home barefoot, Felix 'father noticed a problem.

Simon Laub now thinks he can persuade Can to leave his son alone. By talking to Can's father, he promises to settle the situation for good. Felix is ​​against his father's interference and claims he has no problem with Can. Can finally really brings the shoes back, but trumps arrogantly and shows no regrets. Felix's father replies: "Let's say you had your shoes to clean".

Step by step, a spiral of vengeance and violence is set in motion. Father Laub feels cornered by the increasingly threatening attacks of Can. So he bursts into a lecture and exposes the literature lecturer by mobbing him and the students and also making public Laub's relationship with one of his students. The attacked leaves take increasingly drastic countermeasures: For example, he reports Can to the police for assault and drug trafficking, but also practices vigilante justice and lets his friend Michael, his wife's lover, beat him up. Can is rejected by the father after the police house search .

The conflict turns into disaster after Can sees his life destroyed and breaks into the Laubs house armed with a knife and a pistol. He beats up Felix's father and gags his mother. When Felix, unnoticed by Can, steps into the living room and finds his parents defenseless, he grabs the pistol lying on the kitchen table and points it at Can. However, Can snatches it from him. With the knife at Felix's throat, he now tells father Simon to either shoot his wife or himself with the pistol. Simon turns Can's gun on himself and shakes the trigger, pissing himself in fear of death. However, the gun is not loaded. Can laughs at Felix's father and leaves the living room cursing the family. Felix's father follows him furiously. He attacks Can from behind and kills him by breaking his neck while fighting in the in-house swimming pool. He cries uncontrollably after he has retrieved the youth's body from the water.

Information about the film

Was filmed anger in autumn 2005 in Berlin.

Oktay Özdemir ("I would have liked to have played Felix") plays the youngster Can, the family man and Professor Simon Laub is portrayed by August Zirner . Corinna Harfouch can be seen in the role of his wife, Robert Höller in the role of their son.

The production company Colonia Media , which produced Wut for WDR, had a larger budget - unusual for late broadcast dates - because the production was originally scheduled for prime time .

The screenplay by Max Eipp was considered sensitive material even before it was made into a film and was therefore rejected several times by television officials. The original reason for writing was the author's own experience in the field of youth violence, which he dramatically intensifies in the script.

The television film is a film drama that strives to be realistic. The dramaturgy of the film follows the narrated vengeance and violence spiral right from the start, clearly borrowing from the structure and rhetoric of the novella Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist , which is also the subject of Laub's inaugural lecture. An episodic structure is predominant: While one sequence shows the action, the next often shows the reaction or counter-action without further ado, which gives the action a great tempo. The scenes are alternately assigned to the opposing milieus of the protagonists. What happens in the meantime remains unclear in detail, but can be roughly deduced from what is shown. So z. B. After Can was seen being arrested in his apartment, Can's gang is shown ambushing Felix. In the next shot, Felix's parents find their son unconscious and injured on the doorstep. Due to the episodic narrative structure, however, it remains completely unclear whether Felix and Can live in the same area, maybe even go to the same school, or whether they grow up in completely different parts of the city and only Felix's drug use brings them together again and again. The film also shows almost no motives for the actions, but mainly the actions themselves, leaving plenty of room for the viewer's own interpretations.

The film narration consistently focuses on the main actors: with Felix, his parents (including their two relationships), Can and his father, the repertoire of not only sketchy characters is already complete. Apart from Can's youth gang, for example, no other youths appear, e.g. B. Felix's classmates or friends, and even Can’s gang members, although frequently seen, are not characterized in any way.

Outwardly, the film is based on a commercial feature film aesthetic, sometimes uses alienating effects such as slow motion , but also allows shots like documentary recordings to appear at times. In addition to the German language, Turkish expressions and dialogues can also be heard, but these are only subtitled if it is absolutely necessary for understanding the plot. The language of the youthful roles reflects the actual code among teenagers on the street. A special feature of the otherwise realistically narrated film, which is strictly directed towards the end in chronological order and which dispenses with stylistic devices such as inner monologues or flashbacks , is a short dream sequence by Simon Laub.

The brief musical background of the film soundtrack, like the dramaturgy, reflects the contrast between the two families: It ranges from Turkish folklore to German-speaking hip-hop by German-Turkish rappers (who is also heard by Felix) and classical music by Schubert .

Film review, audience ratings

Anger was highly praised by critics even before it was broadcast. So called z. B. Peter Luley from the Süddeutsche Zeitung Wut “by far the best television film of the season”. Even the Catholic News Agency stated that the film, which was announced as a “tough TV drama” (TV listening + viewing) , should be counted “among the outstanding television events of the year”.

When it was first broadcast on September 29, 2006, the film reached 2.67 million viewers (market share 12.5 percent). The discussion program that followed was followed by 1.27 million viewers (10.8 percent market share). The WDR but also the daily press called the quotas "excellent" given the topic of the programs. The “keen interest” in the broadcasts was also expressed in 1,500 calls from viewers, which the WDR received after the broadcasts to anger .

controversy

While the WDR press release zu Wut placed the film in a row with milestones in television history such as Das Millionenspiel or Smog , youth protectionists criticized the production because of harsh scenes of violence and violent language, which was shown in advance within the Medienforum NRW .

WDR director Fritz Pleitgen finally announced the postponement through a resolution by the directors of ARD, to which he, as a representative of WDR, did not agree: “It is believed that this film is too violent and should not be broadcast at 8:15 pm - in a time when a lot of young people could still sit in front of the television screens. ”Pleitgen, however, would have expected ARD“ a little more courage ”. The film is a film for young people and shows the reality as young people experience it nowadays - not as older adults would like it to be. MDR director Udo Reiter , however, later claimed that the decision to postpone anger had been made unanimously: "To publicly distance yourself from it afterwards and to be celebrated by journalist colleagues as the only courageous under a lot of washcloths, [was] at least a matter of taste".

Other voices - including numerous audience voices in Internet forums - suspect that the depictions of violence are not the main reason for the postponement (the drama was ultimately rated by the FSK as "12 years and older"), but that the film with its title hero Can is a criminal migrant youth and represent its milieu realistically and could therefore be classified by certain circles as xenophobic or racist. Scriptwriter Max Eipp, on the other hand, was quoted in various print media as saying that what is portrayed in the film should be understood as "not representative".

“There are victims and perpetrators of all ethnic groups, including Turks. You have to be able to tell that without immediately providing an explanation for the socialization of a character ”, in this context the Kurdish director Züli Aladağ, who immigrated to Germany from Turkey himself as a child, defended the film against the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger for more naturalness and Normality in the discussion also about the negative sides of migration. The discussion about how to deal with strangeness and the difficulties associated with it should not be left to the right. The film is a contribution to this. According to Aladağ, being able to call things by their name and expressing displeasure about certain conditions has "something very liberating for a certain class of Germans."

The German news magazine Der Spiegel (namely Nikolaus von Festenberg), on the other hand, had previously described the film as “playing with fire”, according to WDR, “to break with the good-humane left-liberal coalition belief that foreigners are actually only victims” -Editor Wolf-Dietrich Brücker ("instead, paradise in the mountains is now running ") gave the reason for the postponement. Der Spiegel also criticized that the film Wut gave the wrong impression that “the previous debate about the integration of foreigners [was] characterized by taboos, by incorrect German consideration.” The magazine described the end of the film, which propagated vigilante justice, as “negligent ". Other papers such as the Hamburger Abendblatt , on the other hand, praised the fact that, precisely because of its end, the viewer "can hardly avoid positioning himself and dealing with his own attitude - which could lead to a taboo-free discussion about migration problems and feigned liberality."

The two Springer -leaves the world and the Bild newspaper held further reasons for the shift from anger to be possible, namely the fear of ARD before Islamic terrorism . So they saw the decision in connection with the riots after a lecture by Pope Benedict XVI. , in which he quotes an utterance critical of Islam, as well as the almost simultaneous cancellation of a production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo , in which the severed heads of religious founders - including that of Mohammed  - are shown. So painted z. For example, the journalist Hajo Schumacher in the world outlined an exaggerated scenario: “What if Islamist hysterics professionals declared the WDR as a target: Denmark, Regensburg, Cologne? Would bankruptcy dolls be dangling from the gallows in Syria, and the in-house magazine 'WDR print' being burned down in Indonesia? If the film topic itself had been defused and non-broadcasting was never an option, such speculations must be assigned to dubious opinion journalism.

On the day before the original broadcast date, ARD chairman Thomas Gruber officially made it clear once again in Munich that the reason for the postponement was solely the commitment of ARD to the State Treaty on Youth Media Protection and to other ARD guidelines and criteria for youth protection: " That and only that is the reason why the production Wut brought in by WDR cannot be shown on Erste before 10:00 p.m. ”.

Notwithstanding this statement reported the day after German media that politicians from SPD and CDU condemn the movement as a "self-censorship": While Johannes Kahrs against the image called the later time slot as "unacceptable" - one could give "as a democracy not permanently any radicals and [ …] Values ​​[…] just give up ”, said Bernd Neumann also in connection with the removal of Idomeneo “ the democratic culture in danger ”. With the Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber , a CSU member , among others, campaigned publicly for the film by the Turkish-Kurdish immigrant Aladag and described the postponement as a “fatal signal. [...] The truth [have] the right to be shown without ifs or buts. "

With the disappearance of the film and discussion in the late evening program, Fritz Pleitgen saw the program robbed of its potential impact on society: "Having a socially important discussion at midnight is of course a wasted opportunity."

discussion

A live discussion that was to be led by a journalist of German and Turkish origin with Sandra Maischberger and Aslı Sevindim and which was to follow directly after the film broadcast under the title Tatort Schulweg: Helpless against youth violence? was planned, did not materialize. Due to the postponement of the film to the later broadcast date on Friday, it could only have started around 11.30 p.m. Instead, a recorded broadcast was shown. The actual topic of the film's youth violence came up from the point of view of politicians, experts and those affected alike. The duration of the broadcast was initially set at 45 minutes, but eventually lasted an hour.

The press invitation to record the discussion program, which took place at the originally planned early date on Wednesday in connection with a film showing of anger in front of a partly young audience, explicitly mentioned, in addition to the topic of "youth violence" printed out in program magazines, problems of the integration of young people from abroad into German society as one of the central issues, as well as the widespread perception on the German side that “young migrants seem to be particularly frequently involved in such acts of violence”.

The audience consisted mainly of teachers, parents and, above all, students from various schools in Mönchengladbach, but also teachers and students from the GHS Alfred Teves School in Gifhorn, Lower Saxony. Guests were also the director of the film, Züli Aladağ, and the main actor Oktay Özdemir. As debaters were Uwe Schünemann , interior minister of Lower Saxony, Armin Laschet , Minister for Integration of North Rhine-Westphalia, the youth criminologist Christian Pfeiffer and a Turkish-born head of a Cologne youth clubs loaded.

The discussion ended with clear criticism from the main actor Özdemir of Armin Laschet , Minister of Integration of North Rhine-Westphalia: He was much too complacent and did not understand the real situation (there was great applause from the young people present). The situation is much more negative and dramatic, whereupon the main actor, as an illustration of the consequences of non-action (for impoverishment) and the drama, described the “wrecking” of young people (parts of their environment) through drug use. Furthermore, the educators would not do justice to the real nature of the situation and therefore ultimately could not help (“They [the educators] have no heart”).

Peer Schader vom Stern later highlighted Özdemir's closing message as the only highlight of the “discouraged ARD round” and otherwise described the discussion as “went wrong”:

“When the 20-year-old Hussein told the audience that he had only been out of jail for two months and that he had the same problems with other young people as before, when he said loudly and clearly: 'I'm getting no help at all,' and that although he was born in Germany without a proper residence permit, he could not even take a job, as the politicians imagine with re-integration, Maischberger simply ignored all of this and asked her panel of experts: 'Are we too tolerant? '"

He blamed the failure to a large extent on the moderator Sandra Maischberger, but also criticized the broadcast concept: "Why weren't students and teachers allowed to discuss the problems and put the experts in the audience to ask them for short statements if necessary? “ Spiegel Online said something similar , where the panel discussion was described as“ a collection of stereotypes ”where“ you don't know what the topic is until the end ”.

effect

"Few films have caused as much buzz as anger in the last few years ", judged the German program guide Gong 2009.

The television cabaret had discovered the film drama as an object of satire even before it was broadcast: On September 27, 2006 , Harald Schmidt excused the earlier start of his broadcast Harald Schmidt in his opening joke with "reasons of the protection of minors" due to the program changes in connection with the non-broadcast .

The Hamburger Abendblatt already saw three days after the broadcast Aladag's goal "a reflection [...] on [possible] violence in German schools, about failed integration, different values ideas and [about] how to make a reasonable coexistence [...] beyond political To initiate correctness [...] succeeded ”and called it“ quite a lot for a television film ”.

In connection with the film show in an interview on the Day of German Unity, Robert Höller also highlighted an aspect of the problem that is mostly avoided in the German discussion, namely that of the exclusion of immigrants by society of German origin:

“It's just that […] people with a migration background are officially recognized by society, but unofficially it's just 'the Turks'. I have the feeling that these people are being excluded from society more and more and that they are less and less likely to find a good job. Often they only get jobs that no German wants, go cleaning or open a kebab shop. Many of them grew up in Germany, but many do not see them as part of this country. The director of the film Züli Aladağ is also a Turk who grew up here and who works as a director today. But if you see him on the street, he is still just a 'Turk' like everyone else. "

Other reruns of the film were partly accompanied by special broadcasts, for example on June 14, 2007 at 8:15 p.m. by a special on the integration-political WDR program Cosmo TV. On February 1, 2008, Wut was broadcast at 8:45 p.m. on the cultural channel arte , but without further discussions and accompanying reports. Furthermore, anger is used in German school lessons with learning materials published by the broadcaster.

On April 18, 2009, a theater version of the film by Volker Lösch and Beate Seidel premiered at the Schauspiel Stuttgart . In it, Can is represented by a choir of young male migrants of various origins.

Awards (selection)

“What a bold, intercultural drama. A thriller that addresses the problems of young people with boldness: the criminal Turk Can, who with his youth gang takes everything from a German high school student, from money to shoes, that he likes; and finally, with escalating brutality, the whole family is bullied until he is killed in an atavistic outbreak of violence by the pupil's father. With this provocative material, brilliantly staged as a disturbing thriller, 'Wut' focused the view on a highly explosive social conflict: youth violence in the migrant milieu - and the inability to confront it. 'Anger' provides no explanations, no socio-therapeutic motivated blame, no reproach and no answer. 'Anger' is a harsh, dramaturgically radically driven tragedy of the clash of two cultures that are deeply alien to one another; the pessimistic picture of failed integration and blatant helplessness on both sides. The unbridled anger of the hateful Turk Can is helpless, and just as helpless in its unworldliness is the liberalism of the German father Simon. "

DVD

The film was also released on DVD in April 2007. Schools from North Rhine-Westphalia can purchase these together with a media package for teaching.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.fsk.de/fskonline/PDF/0704/109228aVDVDUMD.pdf (link not available)
  2. ↑ Age rating for anger . Youth Media Commission .
  3. ↑ Peter Luley: ARD publishes Thriller. 'Anger' from the migrant milieu . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , September 27, 2006
  4. ↑ a b Why are we not allowed to see this film today? ( Memento of October 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: BILD , September 26, 2006
  5. ↑ Cosmo TV on September 23, 2006, 2: 00–3: 00 pm with a focus on youth violence . WDR press office , 23 September 2006
  6. ↑ Reiter against Pleitgen . In: Der Spiegel . No. 43 , 2006, p. 127 ( online ).
  7. ↑ 'Anger' director Aladag defends his film ( Memento from May 4, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ), September 26, 2006
  8. ↑ Michael Aust: How tolerant are you? In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger , September 26, 2006, interview with the director Züli Aladağ
  9. ^ Nikolaus von Festenberg: Turkish devil . In: Der Spiegel . No. 23 , 2006, p. 122 ( online ).
  10. ↑ Maike Schiller: Much anger, little courage . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , September 26, 2006
  11. ↑ Hajo Schumacher : Television: Anger about the postponement of the film 'Wut' . In: Die Welt , September 27, 2006
  12. ↑ Controversial decision. Violent Turks: ARD film 'Wut' is postponed . In: Rheinische Post , September 27, 2006
  13. ↑ "anger" offsets for Stoiber wrong signal . ( Memento of December 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Netzeitung , September 28, 2006
  14. ^ Fritz Pleitgen: "I am angry" '. In: FAZ , September 24, 2006
  15. ↑ Press invitation to record the discussion program "Tatort Schulweg - Helpless Against Youth Violence". WDR press office , September 25, 2006
  16. ↑ Peer Schader: No, we're talking about punishments first ( Memento from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Stern , September 30, 2006
  17. ↑ Hani Yamak: The truth is in the street . Spiegel Online , September 30, 2006
  18. ↑ Gong , No. 15/2009, p. 122
  19. ^ Anger - a television film with side effects . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , October 2, 2006
  20. ↑ Robert Höller: Most politicians have far too little contact with young people on the street . Planet Interview, October 3, 2006
  21. ^ "Anger" at the Stuttgart Theater ( Memento from October 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive )