Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 5, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
From the jury’s reasoning: “The story, which works with alienating historicizing elements (journeyman tradition, music), is told with powerful imagery and extraordinary sound and editing design. Impressive is the powerful realization, through the choice of actors, the form of montage, the visual ideas, of a very personal story that is ultimately about guilt and atonement and about conscience as a yardstick for a successful life. An extraordinarily vital and courageous film has been created that conspicuously stands out from the mainstream of German filmmaking.”
It was murder. For no reason. Just like that. At a petrol station in inhospitable nocturnal Mecklenburg, Bastian (LUKAS STELTNER) kills a city vagrant. Bastian is just twenty. Out of fear of discovery, he goes travelling with a group of travelling journeyman stonemasons. But the experiences on the road drive ever deeper cracks into Bastian’s soul concrete. He finds the chance to prove himself, and his flight from himself leads into a journey to himself: The murder long believed to have been repressed becomes the turning point of his life.
After their much-noticed debut film OI! WARNING, Dominik and Benjamin Reding finally return with another sensational, disturbing and explosive film. For their second directorial work, the brothers venture into the fascinatingly foreign world of travelling journeymen, who tramp through the country on a three-year journey. In doing so, they tell an uncompromising, intense story about two young men whose fates are inextricably linked by a perfidious murder without their knowing it. Alongside film debutants Lukas Steltner and Zarah Löwenthal, Sascha Reimann, better known as rap veteran Ferris MC, can be seen in a leading role. With FOR THE UNKNOWN DOG, the exceptional filmmakers Dominik and Benjamin Reding stage an electrifying cinema experience of raw force. The film has already won the audience award at the 3rd Festival of German Film in Mannheim.
FOR THE UNKNOWN DOG opens on December 6, 2007 in Senator Film distribution under the Autobahn label.
