SELBSTKRITIK EINES BÜRGERLICHEN HUNDES

Julian Radlmaier's visit to Bildrausch 2014 and his encounter here with the Proust of modern cinema, Nils Malmros, has obviously left a mark: with Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog he has turned his dffb graduation film into a kind of autobiographical game-play. Radlmaier plays the young director Julian, who doesn't even receive the smallest shred of public funding for his projects, lands in the purgatory of unemployment and now has to work as an apple picker. Things get complicated when he falls in love with a Canadian beauty and tries to convince her that he is working on the harvest to do research for a communist fairy tale film. He even suffers no less than an existential-ideological crisis when he realises during his work what the term "class antagonism" really means. But then there is also cinema, where other rules apply... The result is Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, a work in the intersection of Pasolini, Beckett and Chaplin: exactly the kind of quirky, witty, formally coquettish and strictly communist fairy-tale film, which Julian continually fabricates so as not to have to tell the truth about his dull existence.