Rostock-Lichtenhagen, former East Germany, August 1992. Several days of siege on an overcrowded residence for asylum seekers culminate in the arson attack on an adjoining residence of Vietnamese contract workers. Molotov cocktails are thrown into the building, hundreds of rioters, encouraged by thousands of onlookers, enter the building while the police temporarily retreats. Focusing on the perspective of a group of local youths, a politician and one of the Vietnamese migrant workers, director Burhan Qurbani provides a ficticious reconstruction the attitudes and conditions that may have led to the attack. Shot in stark black and white and sober in tone, the film follows the timeline of the hours before the attack and imagines how a constellation of boredom, hopelessness, stupor and denial could result in rage and violence.
Conceived long before the current refugee crisis started to dominate the media, Burhan Qurbani’s gripping drama reminds us that already in the early 1990s hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany and met with strong hostility that culminated in numerous violent, in some cases lethal attacks by right wing groups and individuals on asylum seekers, refugees, and even immigrants across Germany. Arson attacks on the homes of Turkish families in Mölln (November 1992) and Solingen (May 1993) led to the deaths of five people. 1996 ten people were killed when a hostel for asylum seekers in Lübeck was set on fire. A fierce debate about German asylum legislation started. Nobody was killed in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, but the riots there became particularly notorious as they went on for days, involved hundreds of attackers and were watched and applauded by an obviously xenophobic crowd of 2000 – 3000 people.
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Deutschland 2014, sw / Farbe, 128 Min. Mit englischen Untertiteln.
Germany 2014, bw / colour, 128mins. With English subtitles.
Director: Burhan Qurbani. With Jonas Nay, Trang Le Hong, Devid Striesow, Joel Basman, Saskia Rosendahl, Paul Gaebler, David Schuetter, Jakob Bieber, Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Mai Duong Kieu, Aaron Le, Larissa Fuchs, Axel Pape, Thorsten Merten, Katrin Kaspar.
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