Tine Kugler discusses her feature documentary, which world-premiered at Berlinale. Concerning a boy born on the wrong side of the Berlin tracks (and certainly no angel), the film is audacious, engaging and moving in equal measure, and proves that the bonds of familial love are as powerful within society’s underbelly as anywhere else across the human spectrum.
Over a period of a decade-plus, directors Tine Kugler and Günther Kurth followed the youngster Kalle (a diminutive of Pascale) in Michael Apted-style fashion á la Seven Up, charting his development throughout segments of his young life. Brought up in a rough neighbourhood of Berlin, Kalle is an original thinker and an articulate interlocutor who explains his frustrations with the world, telling how he doesn’t want to be a ‘ghetto kid.’ And when he’s not talking, he is rapping about his circumstances at a hundred miles an hour. He’s a natural rebel, but possessing of a strong moral compass, as well as a powerful devotion to his family.
But he was dealt a shitty hand of cards from the get-go. He misses terribly his father who refuses to communicate with him. He was therefore brought up by his single parent mum Kerstin who has continually struggled to make ends meet financially. His grandmother was a severe alcoholic (now recovered) whose first husband abused her, and the police are keeping close tabs on Kalle and other kids in the neighbourhood, a place where drugs are freely available.
It was when Kalle was high as a kite on amphetamines that he decided to meet friends at a bus-stop while carrying a carving knife. An encounter with a stranger ended in his inflicting grievous bodily harm on the man, for which he was sent to prison for 2 years and three months.
It was a terrible crime and Kalle knows it, and deeply regrets it.
And it also meant that the ongoing chronicle of his life, as being undertaken by directors Kugler and Kurth, would come to a crashing halt? Well…no.
Kugler explains that they had come this far with Kalle, had developed a deep relationship with him and so had no intention of abandoning him now. “We thought, we can’t stop until he’s out [of prison]. Because we want to tell his life after that.”
The story started a decade before when the pair were making a documentary about ‘latch-key kids’. They were shooting in a youth club, and when the 10-year old Kalle walked through the door, they recognised immediately his qualities as a main protagonist.
“Kalle was the one who touched me most, with his freckles and his smile, and he was open and reflected so much about himself and his life – even at the age of 10. I had the feeling that this would not be the end, this TV documentary.”
And so they continued to follow him every few years, and we see his subsequent physical and emotional development, hear him deliberate, watch his silences.
The cameras are there for his day release from prison, when he recounts how he made friends with a murderer who is serving 14 years. What we are unable to see in the penal establishment is delivered instead via graphic novel-type animation, which further serves to indicate the inner workings of Kalle’s active mind.
“For me, it’s a very good condition to make a film and have a really, really intense connection with someone,” comments Kugler of the closeness she feels for her subject. “Other people tell me I have to be very objective and very reflective. [But] I need the connection to someone.” She adds that after the world-premiere Kalle underlined the very same point, stressing how she and co-director Kurth were like family to him.
Likewise, his mother Kerstin has an open and kind face that reflects years of love and concern for her boy. “Like you say, it’s a bond and it’s a very, sometimes, rude bond, but that’s great. For us, it was a gift to be with them.”
At times the cinematography and framing is delicious, especially during night-time excursions through the streets of Berlin, and much of the time the action is offered plaintive counterpoint within a piano-laden score. We are even offered a sense of hope at the end of the film that the tsunami of affection the family feels for each other can enable a happier and more structured future. (And from a musical perspective, Kalle’s quality rapping turned more than a few heads during the world premiere.)
That said, Kugler tells how, even now, her protagonist is still desperate to make contact with his long-absent father. “Kalle told me yesterday that he tried to reach him over the last days. He wants his father to see this film…He is trying to reach him all the time, but I think it’s a ‘no way.’ He just has no interest. And I think that hurts Kalle very much for his father to have no interest at all.”
