Jean-Paul Raths
"Frontalwatte" is like running against a hard wall and falling down softly. Franz, Adrian and Anastasia stumble through a pointless world. They kill time by viewing apartments, jaw operations, incest and poetry slams. Their search for identity becomes a search for the best fitting role.
The McBee family has erected a government over a future 'colony', that looks like a run-down Paris divided into sectors by the Berlin Wall. All male family members suffer from a mysterious disease and are in urgent need of organ transplants. The perfect donor, Tykho Moon, probably has been killed in a fire, but according to rumours he's still alive. Although assassins stalk the family members, the McBees start a hunt for Tykho. Trying to escape the dragnet, Alex, a sculptor, meets Lena, a killer posing as a whore.
In 1920s Germany, a pupil attends a Latin lesson in which the head of his school, Oberstudiendirektor Himmler, takes over from the teacher. Himmler is in fact the father of the eponymous murderer, Heinrich Himmler. The film is based on the last story by Alfred Andersch.
Berlin-Kreuzberg in the early 1980s. The film is essentially a one-set piece, taking place in a beat-up, graffiti-decorated schoolroom where six teen-age delinquents argue and fight as they await the latest in what has been a series of terrified teachers.
During the Second World War, a small group of students at Munich University begin to question the decisions and sanity of Germany's Nazi government. The students form a resistance cell which they name the "White Rose" after a newsletter that is secretly distributed to the student body. At first small in numbers and fearful of discovery, the White Rose begins to gain massive support after a Nazi Gauleiter nearly incites a student riot after a provokative speech. At this point, the matter is taken over by the German Gestapo, who pledge to hunt down and destroy the members of the White Rose.
