Synopsis
Music, art and chaos in the wild West-Berlin of the 1980’s:
the walled-in city became the creative melting pot for sub- and pop-culture. Before the iron curtain fell, everything and anything seemed possible. B-MOVIE is a fast-paced collage of mostly unreleased film and TV footage from a frenzied but creative decade, starting with punk and ending with the Love Parade, in a city where the days are short and the nights are endless. Where it was not about long-term success, but about living for the moment – the here and now.
Music by WESTBAM, MALARIA!, EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, JOY DIVISION, EDGAR FROESE, DIE ÄRZTE, DIE TOTEN HOSEN, ANNE CLARK, IDEAL, NENA, SEX PISTOLS, TÖDLICHE DORIS and many more, strring: MARK REEDER
There is Blixa Bargeld, skinny as a rake, getting people drunk in the bar ‘Risiko’, and an earnest-looking Nick Cave collecting ‘German Gothic’ on a wall of his room in a Berlin flat. Cool Gudrun Gut stands outside ‘Dschungel’ counting the number of clubs you can go to at two in the morning, and ‘Tödliche Doris’ sings at a most inhospitable Potsdamer Platz. And somewhere in between the Wall and firewalls, the old buildings and the new, Mania D and Westbam, is Mark Reeder from Manchester. Drawn by his love of off-the-wall urban electronic music this British musician, label-maker and military fetishist came to Berlin at the end of seventies, where apparently – and fortunately! – everything he experienced was filmed.
With its copious images and audio material compiled by Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck and Heiko Lange, B-Movie: Lust and Sound in West-Berlin is a documentary and a declaration of love rolled into one. A warm-yet-wrecked reencounter with themselves for all those who were a part of it. And downright mind-expanding for all those who have arrived since and claim to know where Berlin’s bear got down, or even dare assert that things only began to swing in 1990. (65th Berlinale PANORAMA)