Blutsauger
Julian Radlmaier
In August 1928, Soviet factory worker Ljowuschka is cast to portray Trotzky in director Sergei Eisenstein’s film "Oktober". But his dreams of a life as an artist are shattered when the real Trotzky falls out of favour with Stalin and he is cut from the film. Henceforth, the romantic dreamer wants to try his luck in Hollywood. To raise money for the passage, he disguises himself as an aristocrat in a fashionable German Baltic resort. There he falls in love with the young and eccentric millionaire Octavia Flambow-Jansen. A summer romance is in the air – too bad that vampires are on the loose in the area.
Julian Radlmaier’s Marxist costume comedy Blutsauger is bursting with creative ideas and a formal independence: masterfully staged tableaus, a language that feels indebted to literature, and heaps of whimsical characters who fabulate about capital and a free life utopia, thus always referring to the present. The handwriting of dffb graduate Radlmaier is unmistakable in his new film.
14 May 2022
19:30 h, Mal Seh'n Kino
More information
| Direction | Julian Radlmaier |
| Country | Germany |
| Year | 2021 |
| Duration | 127 min |
| Language | Original language |
| Production | Kirill Krasovski / faktura film |
| Cast | Alexandre Koberidze, Lilith Stangenberg, Alexander Herbst, Corinna Harfouch |
| Camera | Markus Koob |
| Script | Julian Radlmaier |
| Editing | Julian Radlmaier |
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Awards
Julian Radlmaier’s new film celebrated its world premiere at the Berlinale 2021 in the Encounters competition. Even before that, the screenplay was awarded with a Lola, the Deutscher Filmpreis. At the Moscow International Film Festival 2021, Blutsauger won the Special Jury Award.
Press Reviews
„A hilarious blend of Marxism, romance and fabulosity.“ (programmkino.de)
„Perhaps it is precisely the non-seriousness of Radlmaier’s cinema that hits the mark.“ (Die Zeit)
The director on the film
„Blutsauger is above all a film about the seductive spellbinding power of the bourgeois-capitalist subject, about the difficulty of human relationships in class society, about the obligation to work and the right to laziness, about the disposal of one’s own time and one’s own body, the structural function of racism, about the fears of descent, the fantasies of advancement, and the old question of whether one can make oneself comfortable as an individual in inhospitable conditions without corrupting oneself.“
(In presence of the director)
Future German Cinema
