Lohengrin

After the essay "On Marionette theatre" by Heinrich von Kleist. The film focuses on Kleist himself, torn apart, searching for knowledge, for identity, trapped in his loneliness and self-absorption, jumping over walls, making grimaces, cruelty, suffering.

The film interweaves three layers: the centre is Kleist's play "Penthesilea". Like from a distance Kleist observes the relationship beween man and woman, when he transfers into mythical Greece what in his time became a problem for him in Prussia - and remains to be a problem also for us. The director's associations during the work form the second layer. Reality and fantasy blend to an imaginary biography of Kleist, the third layer. At the end of the film Kleist is identical with his title character Penthesilesa.

An imaginary biography of Jean Genet, poet and high priest of evil. "Revolt is something I allow myself", said Jean Genet in 1975. Born in Paris in 1910, raised and humiliated in an approved school, a pederast and thief who has been to prison 14 times and expelled from five European countries. His novels are ballads of poisonous beauty, his plays are murky rituals of oppression where each person acts out the role imposed upon him by the others.

The aristocratic families of Rossitz and Warwand, who are relatives, have started to treat each other with mistrust and hatred, since a testamentary contract has stated, that the complete goods will be inherited to the respective surviving line. At the same time the young generation is in love, how can the tender ties between Agnes of Warwand and Ottokar of Rossitz be protected? Killed by their own fathers, they lie in their blood. A radical drama about the term "family". (www.filmgalerie451.de)