Berlin

(OT: Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes)

GERMAN PREMIERE

Director: Julian Radlmaier, Germany, 2017, 99 Minutes, Aspect ratio: 1,37:1, Sound format: 5.1, original language & subtitles: German/ English

Self-criticism of a bourgeois dog (Germany, 2017) is a political comedy with magical twists. The first full-length feature film by director Julian Radlmaier, who also plays the leading role, will celebrate its German premiere at the section Perspektive Deutsches Kino at the upcoming Berlin International Film Festival. The world premiere of the film will be presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the Bright Future Award Competition.

Synopsis

A bourgeois dog confesses how he was transformed from being a filmmaker to being four-legged: Unable to find financing for his film, JULIAN is forced to accept a job as a seasonal farmhand. At a party, however, he makes the young Canadian expat CAMILLE believe that he‘s going to do research for a communist fairy-tale film and offers her the leading part. To his great surprise, she decides to accompany him, sparking off Julian‘s lurking romantic fantasies. Thus they arrive at the deceitfully idyllic scene of an exploitative apple plantation. While Julian finds the manual labour agonizing and fears the strange roommates in his humble container home, Camille enthusiastically plunges into the alleged research and makes friends with HONG and SANCHO, two credulous proletarians in pursuit of happiness. For Julian, it‘s getting more and more difficult to act the communist filmmaker. And what’s more, a hot-tempered model worker with American dreams gets in his way, a mute monk with magical powers and a screw loose shows up, the owner of the plantation accidentally gets killed, and an attempted revolution ends up in confusion. At this moment, however, the sparrows in the trees come up with an unexpected plan...

Director

Julian Radlmaier studied at the German Film and Television Academy (dffb), worked as personal assistant for Werner Schroeter and has translated and edited several film-theoretical writings by french philosopher Jacques Rancière. In 2013, his short A spectre is haunting Europe, which premiered in Oberhausen, received the German Film Critics‘ Award. His next film, the medium-length feature film, A proletarian winter‘s tale (2014), screens at renowned international festivals such as Rotterdam or Viennale and is awarded at FICUNAM Mexico D.F. and Olhar de Cinema (Curitiba IFF). Self-criticism of a bourgeois dog is his graduation film at dffb.

Self-criticism of a bourgeois dog is a Faktura Film Produktion in Co-Production with DFFB and RBB, funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and Nordmedia Mediengesellschaft Bremen / Niedersachsen. German distributor is Grandfilm.