Hint from a Neighbor

1966

44min

A polemical report. "Way to the neighbors" is the motto of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. In their "Remarks on the Oberhausen 66 Film Festival," the GDR documentarians Gerhard Scheumann and Walter Heynowski take the competition selection to task: They see formal experiments as "excesses on the big screen" and instead of political themes, they discover a "surge of perversity." After her own film "Kommando 52" was rejected by the festival, a criminal complaint by the GDR lawyer Friedrich-Karl Kaul against the mercenary and commander "Kongo-Müller" is the focus of a press conference. The refusal of a cinema owner to show the film was a "hint from the neighbors", the neighboring public order office, and therefore state censorship in the Federal Republic of Germany.