FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | preview: Hans Weingartner's Free Rainer (Reclaim Your Brain) |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Sunday, 19 August 2007 | |
 Moritz Bleibtreu in Hans Weingartner's Free Rainer (Reclaim Your Brain). Photo (c): Coop 99, all rights reserved. Even filmmakers have started wondering what is happening on TV. Is really anything at all allowed to try and get better ratings? Was the TV revolution sparked by Big Brother really a TV devolution? Austrian director Hans Weingartner (Die fette Jahre sind vorbei / The Edukators) looks at the sorry state of television in his new film Free Rainer (Reclaim Your Brain), which pitches a disillusioned and coked-up TV producer played by Moritz Bleibtreu against the system. This revolution will not be televised, at least not yet: the film will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September before its release in German and Austrian cinemas on November 15.
After films dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic (Das weiße Rauschen / The White Sound) and the ideals of the revolutionary youth in the face of grown-up complacency (Die fette Jahre sind vorbei / The Edukators), Weingartner turns his cameras to the world of television. Rainer (Bleibtreu, Elementarteilchen / The Elementary Particles) is a reckless and ruthless TV producer who stops at nothing to get higher ratings and who seems blissfully unaware of the dreck he is producing. All that changes when a young girl (Elsa Sophie Gambard) intentionally rams the burnt-out producer's car in revenge for the death of a loved one, and Rainer realises that he has literally been killing for better ratings. After some horrible nightmares, he decides to start a guerrilla-war against the ratings-obsessed entertainment industry by manipulating the audience ratings for more intelligent programmes. Besides German household name Bleibtreu (Lola rennt / Run, Lola, Run, Das Experiment / The Experiment) and newcomer Elsa Sophie Gambard, Free Rainer also stars Gregor Bloéb (Lapislazuli), Milan Peschel (Netto), Simone Hanselmann (Polly Blue Eyes) and Robert Viktor Minich (Cowgirl) and Ralf Knicker (Heidengeld) as fellow guerrilla warriors. German supermodel Franziska Knuppe also plays a role. The screenplay for Free Rainer was written by the director in collaboration with Katharina Held, who also co-wrote Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei. Cinematography was handled by Christine A. Maier (Grbavica, Lucy), for whom this is the first collaboration with both Weingartner and Bleibtreu. Production designer Udo Kramer (Knallhart / Tough Enough) is also new to the Weingartner universe. Related items on european-films.net: |
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