Hans Weingartner, famous for his second feature film The Edukators, which became a landmark film and international cultural phenomena. Reclaim Your Brain, Weingartner's new film is an epic of industrial sabotage about a sleazy reality TV producer. The idea is striking, the pace is quick, and the mental stimulation fits the title and the audience's high expectations.
Worth special notice is a stellar performance by Moritz Bleibtreu, the male face of German cinema since he emerged in 1998's Run Lola Run. As the main character Rainer, Bleibtreu gives his best film performance to date. After Reclaim Your Brain premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on September 11, the Epoch Times conducted an exclusive interview with the director Hans Weingartner.
ET: What was the main urge to make this film?
HW: I wanted the people to wake up and realize that they have to live their life themselves and they should not have someone else live it for them on TV. And I wanted to show to them that if you use your brain, it makes you much happier than if you switch it off. And I wanted to show that watching trash TV is like taking drugs. You are happy for two hours maybe, but after that you feel depressed. I think, people got used to that content in the media—zero content—celebrity news, telenovellas, we are living in the decade of trash. It's horrible! The worst things are the most popular. Our culture, our civilization is about to collapse.
ET: The problem you are tackling—is it affecting the older generation as well?
HW: Older people watch twice as much TV as the young people, but the most dangerous effect TV has is on kids. If you have your kid watch TV before the age of three, you're destroying the life of your own child, because before the age of three the connections in the brain are being made, the anatomy is being formed, the way you see the world is being formed. So if the world is a two-dimensional picture of violence and hatred, this is going to be your life.
ET: So what kind of effect do violence and sex on TV have on the audience?
HW: They destroy our morals, they destroy our love of life, because if sex is something you can have every day on TV and on magazine covers, than that destroys the magic of love.
The same with violence. We have so many serial killers in Germany now. This is the world we live in.
ET: What has the response from the audience been so far?
HW: The audience loves it—they laugh a lot, they clap their hands. They come to me, and want to talk to me. I have had good response from the audience, but not such a good response from the buyers. We have very good distribution in Germany and Austria, but not in other countries yet.
ET: What are your hopes for this film?
HW: I hope that people that are going to see this film, will throw the television out of their window and read a book, then I'm happy. If a hundred people do that, I will have accomplished my goal.
ET: Which books would you recommend them to read?
HW: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Chingiz Aitmatov, Lev Tolstoy, Gunter Grass, Goette, Shiller.
Germany used to be the country of great thinkers. All people have to do now is wake up and go out, and talk to people, and read books. And in the end they will be happier. That is the message of the film: live your life to the fullest, and you're going to be much happier than playing computer games and watching TV.
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