Interview with Kerstin Polte – Film “Dudee”: “Bombs never stop falling”

In “unexploded” a bomb in the Hamburg Schanzenviertel slumbers in the earth. The area must be evacuated so that it can be defused. What contact points do you have with this topic?

My father was born on the run from Silesia in 1944. He never got to know his father because he never came back from the war. Even if my family never spoke about the war, the escape and everything my grandmother has experienced with five small children, there are striking many similar patterns that have transferred to my generation (which the war skirts) that I share with my cousins ​​- without grew up together. I then started to find out about family constellations, therapies, research and interviews, the transgenerational trauma to process and heal them. Many people flinch with sirens, although they were never in war. When I heard that a retirement home had to be evacuated because of a world war bomb, I became aware and thought: How absurd, maybe this bomb has already met people in their lives.

In “unexploded” they now incorporate all their impressions and knowledge.

I wanted to tell a film in which a large bomb triggered many small bombs by people themselves. They mean that people who would otherwise not have met, meet and spend a moment together. It is about hope in the state of emergency and about what connects us across generations, origins and biographies. We always pretend that the war is very far away. But the war still has an impact. Socially, but also very personally. And the bombs don’t stop noticing …

How did you deal with the topic of bombs?

I dealt with all the extent and the entire perversion of the war. Just imagine: There are people whose only activity it is, think about how to kill other people most efficiently! At the time, these bombs already had all sorts of fatal traps, such as bans and long -term lifters. Long -term igniters are maximum fatal because they ignite later. They only explode at the moment when everyone is safe and come out of the bunker. The mere fact that there are still 250,000 unexploded goers in Germany that have not been defused is frightening. I spoke to various people of the ordnance clearance service (KRD) who supported us fantastically. It was incredibly interesting to speak to the people of the KRD on a psychological level: How do people tick 250 times a year and risk their lives almost every day for all of us? The head of the Hamburg ordnance service, for example, says goodbye to his wife every morning as if it were the last time. These are really impressive people.

Interview

Kimi Palme

Kerstin burnBorn in 1975 in Wiesbaden, it was part of the feminist filmmaker collective ROKS her film training she completed in Canada, in the film class of the HFG Karlsruhe and at the Zurich University of the Künste (MA screenplay/directed). Your first cinema game film “Who actually invented love?” (2018) won numerous prizes, including the Bavarian Film Award.

How realistic is the bombing in the film?

The details are right. The actors visited a workshop in the bomb deficiency, and the ordnance clearance service was always there in the scenes with the bomb. We had the original suits and the original equipment (including an original, gutted bomb) on the set. The KRD has supported Anne Ratte-Polle (in the role of the Lane), especially in the main scene, the bombing. We also got the real, armored (defusing) container, in which the defusers are at an explosion if the bomb explodes. Nothing is thought or an idea of ​​the prop. Only the final moment when Lane actually tries to defuse the bomb is due to tension dramaturgy. Usually at least two people would be on the bomb.

How did this feel for you to present a different, various bombing and evacuation team to the ordnance clearing service? Such a team consists only of men in Germany!

After the team premiere, I asked Michael Hain, the boss of the Hamburg ordnance service, how he liked the film. He had tears in his eyes and was very touched. He felt very connected to Otto (Bernhard Schütz), the head of the KRD in the film, because something similar happened to him. The KRD Hamburg liked the film very much, they have also been trying to inspire women for a long time. Personally, I think it’s good to create role models and show opportunities. In the feminist sense: You cannot become what you can’t see.

The figure of the Otto is special. First he seems to correspond to the cliché of the old white man and then he shows a completely different side of himself.

Several people told me that the men’s figures in “duds” are particularly tender and that they rarely see something like that in German cinema. I think we urgently need diverse male figures that can live out emotions than anger. We have taken care of the very neglected and stereotypical female figures in recent years (and rightly!), But forget that men also suffer from patriarchy. I think it’s great to see tender men on the screen.

Otto gets to know his drag-ego, Lane loves women, there is also a transperson, two black women and a refugee. It could have felt easy like a checklist, but it doesn’t. You can feel that they want to map society in all its diversity.

That was also the idea. We looked at the characters and asked ourselves what it means when I occupy a person from a marginalized group and what dimensions this origin. We did not want to normalize them, not problematize, but develop complex and complex figures. In rehearsals and many conversations, we tried to penetrate into the layers of the characters up to the smallest secondary figure: for example with the two police officers who only have two small scenes. Or with Kübra Sekin who plays a doctor who sits in a wheelchair. At Thelma Buabeng (the head of the Hamburg fire brigade) and Haley (the company psychologist) we touched on their origin in the kitchen conversation and the racist question “Where do they come from?” The answer is then “ski jump” and “Poppenbüttel”. In general, we always thought about: where is the cliché and what would we prefer to see? Where is the surprising momentum? Diversity is striped, plays a role, but is not the central element or topic.

In general, they play with expectations that they meet or do not meet …

When we thought: Actually, we prefer to see Otto just seeing a rabbit than the ticking bomb, then we did it. I love Otto’s figure and how Bernhard (Schütz) plays him, although at first glance she has very little in common with me, but I feel an incredible amount of empathy with him. I don’t need 50-year-old queer woman to be able to immerse yourself in a film because it is always about empathy, and we can feel it for all people and living things.

“Dudes”: Germany 2024.
Directed by Kerstin Polte. With: Anne Ratte-Polle, Haley Louise Jones, Bernhard Schütz. 95 minutes, start: May 29th.