This movie is located at the "Oktoberfest" (bigbig, legendary and well-known drinking fest for dumb white-bread idiots) in Munich/Germany. A man who is dissatisfied with his senseless existence in his family-life and social status steals the uniform of a policeman and then enters the "Oktoberfest". - Now he is somebody, he is important, he can help, people respect him, etc. His wife, other relatives and some friends start to follow him while he gets some new acquaintances. The craziness begins! Full ahead! You cannot really say what the sense of this movie is, maybe it's about senselessness of life in general and about the relativity of common values. Amateur actors philosophize about this and that - most of them unemotional as a stone. But this doesn't ruin the movie - it's quite the contrary and supports the absurdity of the scenes and texts. There's no real storyline, it's more like a collage of sketches and clips. And it's also funny that you never know if the protagonists are actors who know they play for the movie (but I guess they do not know WHAT KIND of movie this is!!) or if they are just visitors of the Oktoberfest who happen to fall victim to a crazy-genius movie-director by chance, you know, like hidden-camera or something. - You never know. - And sometimes people get really angry by being annoyed by our false policeman out of control - and I am very sure that he'd got some punches in the face without this uniform. Many of the mono- and dialogues are really funny as hell and also quite intelligent in a subtle and subversive meaning. This movie and with it it's director was a total find for me, I must recommend this a lot, 10 out of 10!

Herbert in plaster
In the films of Herbert Achternbusch the plot is more of a space in which the Bavarian filmmaker, poet and painter improvises. For example as artist and soldier Herbert in Heilt Hitler!, which premiered 25 years ago at the Berlinale. At night Herbert sits with his last comrade in the trenches of Stalingrad. While his comrade is writing with his finger one last letter to the Fuehrer into the air, Herbert starts to plaster himself with the last bucket of plaster, so the Russians find only a statue. Suddenly Herbert finds himself in the Munich of the eighties. At the war memorial in Munich's Hofgarten is written "They will rise again". That's the miracle of Stalingrad. Herbert does not know where he is and tries to scrounge cigarettes, in Russian. Maybe the Germans have won the war, have rebuilt Stalingrad after the model of Munich and renamed it Hitlergrad. On the Munich Marienplatz and Lake Starnberg Herbert observes that all Germans are sick. Like Hitler: "No one is healed." Heilt Hitler! is an absurd farce, shot in eleven days in Super-8 and blown-up to 35 mm, a histrionic, avant-garde artist's film with wonderful monologic passages, where Achternbusch's later conversion to Buddhism is already indicated.
Detlef Kuhlbrodt in DIE ZEIT, 7th July 2011