Blutsauger

August 1928: while workers and farmers search “Das Kapital” for answers to some mysterious vampire bite marks, a self-proclaimed baron enters the life of the charming heiress Miss Flambow-Jansen, as well as her luxury Baltic residence. As it turns out, he is actually a proletarian impostor, forced to escape from the Soviet Union because of a political incident involving no less than Sergei Eisenstein and Stalin himself. Julian Radlmaier takes his trademark “ironical materialism” even further, with a new mixture of ideology and cinephilia that gives rise to a dialectic fable-cum-formalist-comedy, assuming that the Marxist description of the capitalist as a vampire is far from metaphorical. And while the entire film features historical inaccuracies that highlight the subject’s current relevance, it is the finale, with its abrupt detour into manipulation of reality and xenophobia, which really emphasises how injustice and lies prevailed then as now – only now more than ever. The oppressed continue to aim their class violence in the wrong direction, once again offering their necks to the oppressors’ fangs. (Berlinale)