Writer, TV serial creator, comedian, musician, actor, screenwriter and director. German Michael Herbig seems to be a crazy driven person, a hyperenergic entrepreneur in the field of culture.
At the top of the display cabinet there at home he learns to have the award for his 2001 kiosk stranger Der Shuh des Manitu (which seems to be a flaky parody of the writer Karl May's classic Indian hero Winnetou) - one of the biggest audience members in German film and television history.
He can also be proud of having made the German voice for Woody in Toy Story 3.
Now this German Peter Settman has embraced the true but spectacular story of two families who in 1979 managed to escape from East to West Germany in hot air ballooning.
The story has been portrayed before, in documentaries and in Hollywood (Escape in the Night from 1982). Of course, it is a formidable hero and freedom story as well as an indirect tribute to Western society, which here attracts as a Shangri-la. Which in itself probably also seemed like, for those involved. Michael Herbig and team sometimes manage to illustrate the blatant paranoia that prevailed in the GDR; the looks, the fear, the uncertainty.
After all, East Germany was a complex dictatorship that supervised everyone, where the governing called themselves socialists but acted as fascists, painting the nation as the kingdom of heaven on earth, while killing those who tried to flee. It sounds totally baroque, like something that can only happen in an American dozen dystopia (or by all means in North Korea), but it happened close to us, not so long ago.
It is fascinating and nasty tickling. But maybe more so, than the movie itself.
Michael Herbig's directing is not of the most subtle kind. He, and the team, are not ashamed to emphasize the importance of some gadgets through in-camera and pocketing close-ups (this mailbox will be very important) and the emotional moments are portrayed with silent film mimicry (well, but almost anyway). The escape from the GDR makes the painted tension drama of the story; adds a girlfriend there, a devilish Stasiboss there, and cuts something off from the real happening. Well, that's okay, in the name of the poetic license.
Towards the end, the construction becomes the clearest. Reality squeezed in tried-and-tested time-lock format (ie, cross-cut time hunting) and small narrator fins to pump the audience's adrenaline rush. And yes, despite all the academic objections, the flight from the GDR is sometimes quite exciting, the reptile brain is included in the notes, but the knowledge that they are successful (so to speak in the basic premise) dampens the commitment a bit.
At the same time, it is a piece of European history that I cannot get enough of. The best in the class is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's intricate drama The lives of the others, but you can also think of Christian Petzold's Barbara, and the Berlin series: Under the same sky and Deutschland 83.
And of course the mastodont chronicle Heimat 1-3.
In that company, Herbig has a hard time asserting.