What to Do in Case of Fire?
| What to Do in Case of Fire? | |
|---|---|
DVD cover
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| Directed by | Gregor Schnitzler |
| Produced by |
Jakob Claussen Andrea Wilson Thomas Wöbke |
| Written by |
Stefan Dähnert Anne Wild |
| Starring |
Til Schweiger Martin Feifel |
| Music by | Stephan Zacharias |
| Cinematography | Andreas Berger |
| Edited by | Hansjörg Weißbrich |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures (USA) |
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Release date
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November 2001 (Germany) July 19, 2002 (United States) |
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Running time
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101 min. |
| Language | German |
What to Do in Case of Fire? (German: Was tun, wenn's brennt?) is a German film directed by Gregor Schnitzler. It premiered in November 2001 at the German film festival Kinofest Lünen and was released to theaters in 2002. Part comedy, part action and part drama, the movie is set in contemporary Berlin and stars German action star Til Schweiger.
The film received mixed reviews, earning 52 percent favorable ratings from critics cited on Rotten Tomatoes.
Set in Berlin, the film opens in 1987 to show a group of radicals battling police, but soon moves to the modern day to present the same radical characters brought together once more by an act they carried out in their anti-establishment heyday.
In 1987, the main characters of the film are anarchists squatting in an abandoned building in Kreuzberg and making propaganda films. In one of these films, they demonstrate how to make a homemade bomb out of a pressure cooker and chemicals available over the counter, and they plant the bomb in a vacant villa in Grunewald. However, the timer sticks, and the bomb does not go off until 12 years later, when it is jostled by a real estate broker and a potential buyer. They are injured in the blast, and the police are pressured to hunt down the "terrorists" responsible.
Two of the original anarchists, Tim (Schweiger) and Hotte (Martin Feifel), still live in the original building and engage in anti-police graffiti, anti-gentrification protests and petty theft. The current owner of the building, a nouveau riche Turk named Bülent, cannot evict them, because Hotte is disabled, having lost his legs. (It is later revealed that they were crushed by a water cannon during a riot.) While Tim is out, the police raid the building in a sweep for clues to the bombing and confiscate their cache of old films, including the incriminating bomb-making film. They cart the films off to the fortresslike police headquarters, a former Prussian military barracks. One by one, Tim and Hotte visit the former members of their group to warn them of the bust. They are distressed by the news, having gone on with their lives: Nele (Nadja Uhl) is a single mother of two young children; "Terror" (Matthias Matschke) is an attorney; Maik (Sebastian Blomberg) runs an advertising agency that exploits radical imagery; and Flo (Doris Schretzmayer), Tim's former lover, has evidently gone bourgeois, although her circumstances are never fully explained, and is about to get married. They balk when Tim and Hotte propose breaking into the police headquarters and destroying the evidence, but Terror's counter-suggestion that they should turn themselves in is met with even stronger disagreement, and finally the former radicals devise the plan of infiltrating the headquarters by pretending to be a television news crew.
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Wikipedia