We Are Next of Kin

On the evening of 25 March 1996, Jan Philipp Reemtsma – tobacco-empire scion and multi-millionaire, academic, publicist and patron of the arts – was kidnapped in the vicinity of his Hamburg home. After a ransom of tens of millions of Mark was paid, Reemtsma was returned to his family. But what did his partner, psychoanalyst Ann-Kathrin Scheerer, and their son Johann do during those days of fearful waiting? The latter, by now a successful music producer, remembered these times in his first book, which he insists on calling a novel: "Wir sind dann wohl die Angehörigen" (2018), which Hans-Christian Schmid has now turned into an extraordinarily sensitive piece of cinema. It is an anti-thriller that talks about the attempts of Reemtsma’s family and the police to keep up a sense of normality under the most extreme of circumstances. Schmid shows how very deep, momentary yet nevertheless real emotions and relationships develop, in a setting that could barely be more theatrical, with cops becoming housemates etc. A subject truly to his liking, of course, as some of Schmid’s greatest films, like the made-for-TV fiction feature debut Himmel und Hölle (1994), or 23 (1998) or Requiem (2006) all deal directly with the fragile, illusory nature of reality. A masterpiece. Really. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)