What do you live?
Oct 25, 2009 Uncategorized
What do you live?
A young director with no budget, a graduate of the Cologne Academy of Media Arts with the experience of collaboration in small documentaries, youth club meets in Cologne on a group of youths who come from immigrant families. It strives to win this for a trial environment with the camera, because it is the handling of the guys together and impressed by their language. That certainly does not sound like an earth-shattering initial situation, perhaps for a solid documentary for television, and yet the film is what you live for? by Bettina Braun has become something very special.
Ali, Kais, Ertan Alban and are good mates 16 to 20 years, which depend in their free time together, their thoughts and conversations revolve around education and training, discussions with its most traditional Muslim parents, some for girls, and often to their positioning within a society in which they have to fight for their place is often laborious. Announced are of wit and coolness, and there’s a harsh tone with each other, and yet their relationship is characterized by respect and loyalty. Meet them at first sight, the stereotype of masculinity adolescent posturing, a self-presentation, a caricature of the expectations and prejudices against their home, a closer look but their vulnerability, warmth and self-free sets, with which it conflicts of adolescence in search counter to their own cultural and personal identity. The audience meets four young men who openly talk about their dreams in which they see as a successful rapper and actor, but also be aborted in their harsh reality in the training and there’s trouble with the police as well as a musical Premiere, in which for any of them actually fulfilled a dream.
Bettina Braun took What do you live? Together with its protagonists very successfully participated in several festivals, the film opened the Duisburg Film Week 2004 where it won the Audience Award, won first prize at Cannes Turkey / Germany 2005 in Nuremberg, and was awarded the Phoenix Documentary Award this year. The director, also responsible for book, camera, editing and sound, only received after a long pause, the two-year shooting the film support and a promise of “little TV play” of ZDF, with Christian Cloos, who opposed the project initially, until he was through convince some clippings left, took over the editorship.
The filming required a high degree of flexibility and time again convince the director, for the distrust and the refusal of the guys was at first very large. There has been extensive, tough bargaining over what could be filmed and shown, and themes crystallized out gradually. Bettina Braun found himself critical of representatives of a TV generation compared with that demanded a very deliberate approach with the production and its role as an absolute transparency before they were ready to cooperate fully, described the Alban reflective: “We played a piece, without the learning text by heart: our lives “.
The very special thing about this film, but occurred at a different level. In the course of working with young people and the precise arrangements on their borders Bettina Brown found himself back in the first situation report at length about themselves and their work, until finally the boundary between the filmmaker and their “objects” that largely obliterated was that they own their own protagonist, to one of them was, and the environment documentary dealt with the documentation environment, so that the detached observation abolished in favor of a subjective, very personal and involved position was. Include the director, who was pregnant during the filming, her child was born, and ultimately opted for their own development and that of her son with the documentation, it has certainly followed a not unusual and controversial way, although some of her success that has. Worlds and has the documentation, but finally moved that a filmmaker and the cast of which there are all united in the end.
What do you live? certainly a courageous film, which is desirable, not least, a young and critical audience.
(Mary Anderson)
Title: What do you live? Country of production: Germany Year of production: 2004 Length: 84 (Min) Distribution : Real Fiction
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