Sophisticated Acquaintance

This film experiments with a fragmentary form of do-it-yourself cinema, mixing elements of narrative, experimental and pseudo-documentary to tell the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. A heavily stylized and fictionalized version of real-life author Klaus Mann (John Gross) lives in the shadow of his father, the successful intellectual, novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on the concept of "revolutionary suicide" in protest of the world's selfishness and then acts out on it, a group of his contemporaries speak out in (staged) interviews about what led him down that road. It is a film about the creative process, the heartbreaking depiction of a rigid and strained father-son relationship and, most of all, it is a film about individuality.