Lucky (Niggers)

In 1999 in Berlin, filmmaker Thomas Heise staged a production of Heiner Müller’s “Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome” with a group of teenagers. Lucky (Niggers) presents a fragmented depiction of the experiences of those young people whose lives Heise documented over the course of the next six years. Eschewing a simple narrative structure Heise instead offers an impressionistic vision of youth and growing up in this unconventional coming of age film. The young people’s struggles, hopes and disenchantments are presented to us not through interviews but in a mosaic of sound, images, text, letters, and footage filmed by the teenagers themselves. This portrait of a generation speaks of time passing and time wasted and the young people’s uncertainty about the future given all that has gone before. (DOK.fest München)