Bastard
US Premiere
Germany, 2011, color, 126 mins., German with English subtitles
Director/Screenplay: Carsten Unger Producer: Reza Bahar, Nicole Ringhut Cast: Martina Gedeck, Markus Krojer, Antonia Lingemann, Thomas Thieme, Hanns Zischler Sales: Gifted Films (Ludwigsburg, Germany)
Discussion with director Carsten Unger and producer Reza Bahar follows both screenings.
As a viral video makes chillingly clear, a nine-year-old boy is being held against his will in a cavernous concrete basement. Criminal psychologist Claudia Meinert (Martina Gedeck) makes inquiries, finding inconsistencies in his parents’ stories. Soon the trail leads to the boy’s school and 13-year-old Leon (Markus Krojer), an adopted bad seed of monstrous proportions whose link to, and interest in, the affected families is far from clear. When Leon’s needy, malicious classmate Mathilda (Antonia Lingemann) stumbles on new information, the stakes are raised enormously. Bastard is a supremely confident and profoundly disconcerting feature film debut by 33-year-old Carsten Unger, who has made a confrontational, thought-provoking thriller in the vein of Roman Polanski and Michael Haneke that deservedly won recognition at the Hof festival for Lars Petersen’s glacially beautiful widescreen cinematography. — Eddie Cockrell
Carsten Unger (b: 1978, Gütersloh, Germany) worked as a trainee at Vogelsänger Studios, studied at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy from 2001-2007 and attended The Hollywood Perspective masterclass at UCLA. Following numerous short films, Bastard is his feature debut.
