Johnny & Me - A Journey Through Time with John Heartfield

With a pair of scissors and some paper, he turned his art into a weapon the Nazis feared. A look back at the eventful career of satirist John Heartfield (1891-1968), pioneer of photomontage and modern graphic design.

Berlin, an old building around the time of reunification. Squatter Bert is dead, suicide. His three ex-girlfriends Brit, Sandra and Anne search together for the reason. In the process, they become painfully aware of their different life plans.

St. Petersburg 1917. The frontline of the global war is coming closer everyday; people are hungry, wor-ried, angry. In February the tsar is overthrown. Many artists are euphoric: Revolution! Freedom, finally? No. Starting in October, the Bolsheviks rule by themselves. What were poets, thinkers, and avant-gardists like Maxim Gorky and Kazimir Malevich doing during this drastic change of power? In the film, five of them alight from the director’s piles of books as animated cut-out figures. With their own recorded words in their mouths, they participate in salons, committees, and street riots.

With an old photo album under her arm, filmmaker Katrin Rothe sets off for her hometown of Gera to take a portrait of her great-niece Laura. But things turn out differently.