Don't Follow Me Around

In the summer of 2006, film directors Dominik Graf, Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler began corresponding with each other on the subjects of film aesthetics, the Berlin School, Germany and the film genre (their correspondence was published in German film magazine Revolver). Two years later they decided to continue this theoretical discussion with a joint film project: three individual stories revolving around the same “fait divers:” the escape of a convicted criminal from police custody. Graf’s Komm mir nicht nach tells the story of a police psychologist who meets old acquaintances while investigating a case. In Petzold’s Etwas Besseres als den Tod, a young man doing alternative national service experiences a love story without a future. And in Christoph Hochhäusler’s Eine Minute Dunkel, an indefatigable policeman hunting the escaped prisoner begins to doubt false certainties. Three films, three styles, three exciting approaches, variations, analyses. German television stations made this all possible. As Dominik Graf wrote: “… this work vis-à-vis mainstream TV, at its edges, in contradiction to and yet, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, in commentary on that mainstream – I find and have always found this to be extremely creative.”

Dominik Graf’s Don’t Follow Me Around:

Somewhere in the Thuringian Forest – a mythical region full of legends and superstition – a sex offender roams. Police psychologist Johanna is dispatched to Thuringia. She stays with her friend Vera and Vera’s husband Bruno, who have lived in this region for some time now. Old stories and old feelings surface. The two women come to realize that, ten years ago in Munich, they were both in love with the same man at the same time, without ever encountering each other. –Berlinale