If Not Us, Who

“Veiel’s script displays impressive cogency in examining the relations between words, beliefs and action in a cultural context that is as influenced by literary as by political allegiances.” Jonathan Romney (Screen Daily)


Genre Drama
Year of Production 2011
Director Andres Veiel
Principal Cast Michael Wittenborn, Lena Lauzemis, Alexander Fehling, Maria-Victoria Dragus, Rainer Bock, Thomas Thieme, Susanne Lothar, August Diehl, Imogen Kogge
Length 124 mins
International Festival Screenings Berlin 2011, Moscow 2011, Jerusalem 2011
Awards Alfred Bauer Award Berlin 2011, German Film Award 2011 (Best Film Bronze)

West Germany in the early 1960s. The country is quiet – for the time being. Bernward Vesper takes up his studies in Tubingen where he is attending Walter Jens’ seminar on rhetoric. Bernward wants to be a writer and spends his nights bashing the keys of a typewriter. At the same time he is keen to defend his father, the poet Will Vesper who was celebrated by the Nazis. The land where Bernward lives is being suffocated by its past and old Nazis are back in positions of power.
One day Bernward meets Gudrun Ensslin and her friend Dorte. Before long, the three friends are living together in a ménage-à-trois but it soon transpires that Gudrun and Bernward are twin souls. This marks the beginning of an extreme relationship that is unquestioning and excessive, a love story that goes beyond the threshold of pain, and culminates, when the external circumstances change and Gudrun and Bernward become part of a social and political upheaval that soon takes hold around the globe: liberation movements, student protests and the Black Panther movement in the USA, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. The course of history is inexorable but for a moment, it looks as if it might be possible to change its path. If not us, who? And when, if not now?
Yet then another man, Andreas Baader, appears on the scene...

Andres Veiel was born in 1959 in Stuttgart and studied Psychology in Berlin. He then attended seminars in Directing and Dramaturgy at the Artist House Bethanien in Berlin from 1985-1989. Since then, he has been active writing film and theater scripts and lectures at the Free University in Berlin. His films include: A Winternight's Dream (Winternachtstraum, documentary, 1992), Balagan (documentary, 1993) winner of the IFFS Main Prize and the German Film Award in Silver, The Survivors (Die Überlebenden, documentary, 1996) winner of the Main Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Munich and the Adolf Grimme Award in 1998, the highly-acclaimed Black Box Germany (Black Box BRD, 2001) for which he received the German Film Award for Best Documentary in 2002 and the European Film Award, Die Spielwütigen (2004) and The Kick (2006) which won the Grand Prix Cinema du Reel.

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