Out of Thin Air is a German-French co-production. It tells the story of a woman who has worked so hard to get justice up to her life. The film won the 2018 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The tensioning performance of actress Diane Kruger won her the film at the 2017 Cannes International Film Festival.
The story of the film is not complicated.
A woman, Katya, has a happy family, although her husband Nuri was once imprisoned for drug trafficking, but he taught himself business in prison, and after his release, he started his own company, and the two had a lovely son, Locke.
One day, a targeted bomb attack suddenly occurred near her husband's company, taking the lives of Katya's husband and 6-year-old son. During the investigation, the police found trace amounts of drugs hidden in Katya's home and determined that there was a young couple, Edamer and Andrei Möller, who were neo-Nazis, who were suspected enough to carry out the bombing.
In court indictment, the father of the suspect's young man testified that his son and daughter-in-law idolized Hitler and had in the garage raw materials for making bombs that matched the remnants of the bomb scene.
However, the prosecution had its own judgment during the trial: the key to the garage where the bomb was made was possible for someone else, and there was also another person's fingerprint in the residue, which increased the likelihood of someone else committing the crime. The young couple's accomplices also testified in court: at the time of the crime, the couple was on holiday in Greece. Katya, who has lost a loved one, has also been questioned about the validity of her testimony because she had taken drugs.
Because of insufficient evidence, the suspected couple was acquitted on the spot. After their release, the two men escaped to the Greek seashore.
Katya was so distressed and disappointed that she resolutely tracked down to Greece, learned to make her own bombs, treated them the way they were, and finally died with the suspects in the caravan where the couple was hiding.
After watching this film, I thought of two domestic films, Zhang Yimou's "Qiu Ju Fights a Lawsuit" and Feng Xiaogang's "I Am Not Pan Jinlian", and also thought of a French film "In the Name of a Daughter". These are films that react to the obsession with seeking justice for themselves or for others. However, "Out of Thin Air" is far more full of blood and tears than these films, and the tragedy is the strongest.
After watching this film, my feelings are very complicated, very unpleasant.
On the one hand, I am pleased that the German film industry has been able to continue to make films that reflect on World War II and Nazi thought. After the end of World War II, the then Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Willy Brandt, fell to his astonishing knees. On December 7, 1970, Brandpo, who was visiting Poland, suddenly and spontaneously knelt down after laying a wreath at the Monument to the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, in silence to mourn the victims killed during the invasion of Nazi Germany. The outside world has highly commented on this: it is one person who kneels, but it makes the whole nation stand up.
In fact, in Germany after World War II, the only person who can kneel down and reflect is Brandt. In the German film industry, a large number of films were produced, such as "The Wave", "The Silent Classroom", "Hitler is back", "Masterless" and so on. All of these films run through the same theme: deep reflection and reflection on the causes of World War II, on Hitler's Nazi thought.
It is with this reflectiveness that Germany was able to gain forgiveness from the war-victim countries and their peoples. In contrast, our neighbor Japan did not show a sincere heart in its attitude toward World War II and its reflection on the spread of militarism.
A country and a nation that can reflect on it all the time is worthy of respect. "Out of Thin Air" is a reflection on neo-Nazism that accompanies issues such as race and immigration. The film is more relevant in today's European countries.
On the other hand, I am deeply saddened by the way the heroine of the film takes to get justice. The main reason why Katya's husband Nuri and son were killed was that Nuri was a Turk who immigrated to Germany. In a modern society, such tragedies at least show that it is still very difficult to eliminate Nazi ideas in people's minds, and it also shows that there are blind spots hidden in any society that are born of tragedies.
First, neo-Nazi ideas occupy a certain place in the minds of younger generations. Like the young couple in the film, they are neo-Nazis, who put neo-Nazi ideas above the lives of others, like extreme religious and racist fanatics, frantically carrying out extreme bombings, resulting in the death of innocent people, outright madness.
Second, neo-Nazi ideology has a certain soil in the superstructure and ideological field. Due to various factors in Western society, such as politics, religion, race, and immigration, social contradictions have become increasingly acute and prominent, and neo-Nazism has not only grown among young people, but also manifested itself to varying degrees among practitioners of legal institutions such as procuratorates and courts. From the film, it can be seen that the immigration status of Katya's husband increases the difficulty of Katya's justice to varying degrees. The inaction of the judiciary also requires some responsibility for the tragedy of Katya.
Third, the tragedy of modern society shows that there are blind spots in this society. Only a person who is desperate will take a decisive approach to justice. It is often said that there is justice in the world, not that the time has not yet come. From the perspective of the bystander, there is patience and time. However, for a weak person, if you do not seek justice for a day, the physical and mental burden will increase. When the dawn of justice is still not visible after suffering, it is the last straw that crushes the body and mind. As long as you can exchange for the advent of justice and justice, even if you sink into the abyss of eternal rebirth, you will not give up. This is Katya's physical and mental journey to get justice.
Seeing Katya finally pull out the homemade bomb and die with the enemy who killed her husband and son, the hearts of good people will shrink to the extreme and deep pain.
No society will be bright, there will always be an inner blind spot. Once this blind spot is over-magnified, or if the blind spot happens to act on a person, it is possible to produce irreparable tragedy.
May our world have fewer blind spots, and it is better not to have such a tragedy!