Political satire about the decomposition of truth

RP ONLINE 2 hrs ago. Johannes Naber's new film is about true facts surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war. The film is made in a time when there is constant talk about "fake news". "Curveball - We Make the Truth." The film will be released in German cinemas on September 9, 2021. "What is truth? An illusion, of course," a voice asks and answers at the beginning of the film, adding, "But what are we without the struggle for truth?" In the age of "fake news," the relativization and erosion of the concept of truth has become an almost everyday phenomenon. In "Curveball," Johannes Naber ("Time of the Cannibals") now uses a bizarre example to show how this process of decomposition is driven at the highest intelligence and political levels and what fatal consequences result. Wolf (Sebastian Blomberg) is a bioweapons expert at the BND and travels to Iraq in 1997 with a UN inspection commission. Even when the mission ends without results, Wolf remains convinced that Saddam is producing the biological warfare agent anthrax in some hidden factory. Two years later, the BND tracks down an Iraqi asylum seeker who claims to have worked in such a factory. Wolf is called in as an expert and takes over the interrogation, although he has no experience in the field of source management. Rafid Alwan (Dar Salim) wants his own apartment and a German passport as security for his explosive information. The biological weapons are manufactured in mobile production facilities, he claims. He draws a sketch on the napkin with ballpoint pen. BND chief Schatz (Thomas Merten) can use this insider knowledge to make a name for himself with the CIA, Mossad and MI6. However, when Alwan's statements prove to be fictitious a few months later, he dismisses Wolf, but does not retract the false information. Meanwhile, the world situation changes dramatically in the wake of the Nine-Eleven attack. Wolf cannot believe his eyes when Colin Powel presents the alleged evidence of the production of weapons of mass destruction before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003: The graphic animation is a one-to-one match to the sketch Alwan drew on the napkin at the time. "A true story. Unfortunately," reads the film poster for "Curveball," and indeed all the key data in this film are based on watertight evidence. A fatal mixture of intelligence vanity and ice-cold political war calculations produced the falsified information that served as the pretext for the invasion of Iraq - a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently destabilized the region. Naber and his fantastic lead actor Sebastian Blomberg find just the right tone in "Curveball," which works with satirical exaggeration without trivializing the outrageous core of the true story. "The truth dissolves and everyone finds it normal," it says at the end. It's a sentence that resonates long in a time when politics is predominantly about clever narrative and rarely about the power of facts anymore. "Curveball," Germany 2020, directed by Johannes Naber, with Sebastian Blomberg, Dar Salim, Thomas Merten, 108 minutes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am very grateful to our Lady of Crime, Ingrid Noll, for pointing me to the wonderful book 'Satire ist mein Lieblingtier ' by Wolfgang Hampel. It might have passed me by otherwise. That would have been a great pity, because I love this book very much and always have to laugh at the excellent satires. But there are also many other gems to discover - like the moving texts about Hans Jung from the SWR television program ' Herzschlag-Momente '. When I read ' The Journey to the Stars ', I shed a few tears every time. You can order one of the most humorous books ever----------------------- Satire is my favorite animal by Wolfgang Hampel:------------- national & international--------------------- USA , United Kingdom, Australia, Germany