Inside and outside. Partying and frustration. Day and night. Yesterday and today. Director David Dietl ( KÖNIG VON DEUTSCHLAND, RATE YOUR DATE) has made a film about the in-between. Or rather about those who live in-between. In his documentary BERLIN BOUNCER he portrays 3 of the most renowned bouncer personalities in Berlin. Sven Marquardt, Frank Künster, and Smiley Baldwin also represent the heterogenous biographies in the reunified Berlin of the post-reunification period. A former eastern Punk and photographer with face tattoos and piercings. An African-American ex-GI. A west German school drop out. They all slid into it somehow, in the night life of this city, and got stuck there: they found something that still has a hold on them to this day. BERLIN BOUNCER is less a film about the actual job of a bouncer, you could find out more about the job in any solid TV report. Dietl is interested in the emergence of the Berlin club myth of the 1990s and 00s and with that also the metamorphosis of this city, which he turns into the fourth protagonist. He shows the coping strategies the participants found in order to deal with the changing times: for some the great era just seems to exist as a nostalgia-soaked memory, others have dealt with the new circumstances, and some find their own spots in the (counter) culture. The motives for the different attitudes become clear during the journeys to the places of their past. There‘s a respectful – maybe also sceptical – distance between the protagonists and the filmmaker here too, so no sentimentality can arise.

Jens Mayer (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy