Diane Kruger, Denis Moschitto, Numan Acar, Samia Muriel Chancrin
Diane Kruger gives an astonishing, Cannes Best Actress award-winning performance in this riveting thriller by Turkish director Fatih Akin (Head-On, The Edge of Heaven), which screened in Competition at the Festival and subsequently collected the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
A loving, if unconventional wife and mother, Katja’s (Kruger) life falls apart when her Kurdish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) and their young son Rocco (Rafael Santana) are killed in a bombing in their home city of Hamburg. Struggling to cope with shock and the weight of her tremendous grief, she becomes obsessed with finding the perpetrators and understanding the reasons behind the seemingly senseless killing. Danilo (Denis Moschitto), a lawyer and Nuri’s best friend, represents Katja against the suspects – who hail from the xenophobic hard right – in a trial that pushes her to a moral crisis in her desperation for both justice and revenge.
A politically charged tale of grief and violence in modern Germany, Akin’s film dwells on both the pleasures of multiculturalism and the horror it causes on the far right; asking questions about how liberal societies should deal with home-grown extremists, as well as how their victims can fight back. A courtroom drama as well as a thriller, it’s anchored by Kruger’s brilliantly compelling turn as the hard-drinking, drug-using Katja, for whom the trial is a search for meaning in a newly nonsensical world.
