Cabaret-Berlin: The Wild Scene (2010)

Entirely composed of visual and audio archives; German fictions and musical operettas of the period, news clippings and documentary footage, musical shorts, home movies, restored in HD, as well as photographs and photo montages, paintings and drawings. "CABARET-BERLIN, THE WILD SCENE" offers an inside view of the Berlin artistic kabarett scene, as an eye witness to the Weimar Republic's history, and doing so, reveals "the true story of Cabaret". With unheard-of artistic expressions, and serving as a lightening rod for criticism and protest, the Berlin cabarets became critically reflective mirrors of topical events, politics and culture of the unstable Weimar Republic, as well as the symbol of Berlin Tempo, too. Alongside the dramatic events accompanying the Era of Inflation, the Golden Years, the Depression and the surge of Nazism, the film shines a spotlight on this watchtower of unbroken conscience. The film itself is structured as a cabaret show led by its Master of Ceremony, the famous actor Ulrich Tukur who, off-screen, narrates necessary background information, connecting songs and sketches to their historical, political and social context. The treatment sticks to the aesthetic style of the period and uses the archive sources not as documentary samples, but as a stock of edited rushes which weave the dramatization of the story. At the end of the day, CABARET-BERLIN, THE WILD SCENE is a film about the birth of modernity.