After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

The Holy Bunch

The whole world in one film: Robert, a young Dane, is shanghaied in Marseille, and via Acapulco he is abducted into the South Pacific. There he kills his father and seduces his mother. Then he explores the changing world. The end finds him in a Polynesian village, where the chief bestows him with a girl of his age-class. A novel of adventure, a novel of love, also an oratory of some sort.

The Open Universe

Rolf Dieter Brinkmann was a celebrated and iconoclastic German poet who brought the rebellious attitude of the Beat Movement to Europe in the early Sixties. Having no use for the sentimental poetry and burdens of moral responsibility that permeated post-war German, Brinkmann's verse depicted contemporary life with a bold immediacy which also informed his work in film, photography, visual art and audio collage. Brinkmann's life outside of the public eye was every bit as turbulent as his public image, though in different ways -- he had a stormy relationship with his wife and their son was severely handicapped. Filmmaker Harald Bergmann wrote and directed Brinkmanns Zorn (aka Brinkmann's Wrath), a biographical drama which stars Eckhard Rhode as Brinkmann and Alexandra Finder as his spouse. Brinkmanns Zorn was screened in competition at the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi