Out of Thin Air movie poster for the German version
Reference news network reported on May 28 that the movie "Out of Thin Air" can be called the European version of "Three Billboards", it was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival in France, and the heroine Diane Kruger played the vengeful goddess of "fighting violence with violence", and her superb acting skills deserved to win the best actress in the 70th Cannes main competition unit.
Although the film was produced in Germany and France, it uses a narrative fluid American way of telling, referring to cultural notes that even English songs accompany the climax of the opening and closing credits.
In a way, the social significance of the film is far greater than its artistic value. "Out of Thin Air" is more about showing stories, values, and perspectives on social events— not only showing the judicial dilemmas in democracies, but also exploring the growing immigration problems and conservative political tendencies in European societies.
Germany's "Neo-Nazism"
The story begins with an ordinary family of three who were originally happy and calm, and this happiness and calm contrasted sharply with the subsequent disintegration. A tragedy strikes suddenly – her husband and 6-year-old child are killed in a neo-Nazi-orchestrated bomb attack, while Diane Kruger's hostess, Katya, is radically reoriented, experiencing initial mourning and emotional twists and turns of feeling powerless to justice and finally embarking on a journey of revenge.
Judicial inaction
The story of "Out of Thin Air" is inspired by real events in society. The most high-profile characters are The German "Neo-Nazis", which are deeply rooted and wide-ranging and interconnected through social networking sites. The "neo-Nazism" they follow is a political trend of thought that emerged after World War II, aimed at perpetuating the Nazi spirit, maintaining racial purity, and emphasizing the superiority of the race.
In the film, neo-Nazis use brutal methods to achieve their goals, using nails, gasoline, flour to make bombs, purging what they consider to be foreigners, Turkish Germans, and cooperating with Greeks to escape justice.
And in the scene of the judicial trial, you can even feel the creators trying to imply that government officials are also racially biased, so they let it go. Because of the victims' past drug trafficking experience, the judiciary concluded that the bomb attack was related to the secret collusion of the drug trade, and refused to believe that the attack was involved with neo-Nazi organizations. And even in the end, the victim prosecution represented by the heroine had a lot of favorable evidence, but the judge "the key in the garage may have been used by his person, and the fingerprints of a third person other than two people cannot be determined" is not a sufficient rebuttal detail, as the basis for the verdict, "acquitted" the two assault suspects.
The highlights of the exceptionally wonderful judicial trial also correspond in reality.
Disasters don't "come out of thin air"
In fact, there are many new immigrants in German society, and the disputes caused by them are extremely fierce...
The film's footage is based on this : Neo-Nazism attacked German immigrants several times between 2000 and 2007 , when the German media and society initially targeted Turks or Kurds in Germany. According to data from the German Federal Statistical Office in August 2017, 18.6 million people with immigrant backgrounds in Germany, accounting for 22.5% of the total German population. The fate of immigrant groups reflects the situation of everyone in this society.
A seemingly sudden catastrophe is not "out of thin air", the historical, political, and social background involved is intertwined, and a good world will not "come out of thin air", racial discrimination, xenophobia, hatred, not only in Germany, but even in many Western European countries, including Greece, there are tangible and invisible figures.
Heroine Katya goes to "violence for violence" in despair
It is this kind of despair that pushes the heroine to a dead end — she concocts the bombs used by neo-Nazis and leads the terrorists to death.
Is this "countering violence with violence" approach the only way to solve the problem of migration?
Director Fatih Akin is a Turkish-German, and you can see the irrepressible anger behind the director through the heroine's interpretation. He never ceased to pay attention to the living conditions of immigrants in his works, and he almost became the face of Turkish immigrants living in Germany.
Is "Out of Thin Air" too intense?
But isn't "Out of Thin Air" too intense? Maybe it's just one of a different way of expressing it.
Another famous Finnish director, Aki Kolysmaki, has a completely different style of expression.
Achi Korismäki said: "The world is miserable enough, and it would be cruel to have another sad ending." So he made a film about the "precursors of immigrants", refugees, "The Other Side of Hope", so that we can look at the suffering of these people vertically and more comprehensively.
The Other Side of Hope is a calm, cold and humorous account of what happened to refugees
"The Other Side of Hope" tells the story of Khalid, a Syrian refugee who wants to join the Finnish Immigration Service but is exterminated, repatriated, and taken in for help by well-wishers after fleeing. You can see in the film the faces of all living beings – refugees with the same disease, restaurant owners in business crisis, colleagues with cold faces, but you can also empathize with finland's social problems, the difficulties and malice that refugees face when they try to immigrate.
The film uses a very different calm, cold and humorous way of telling the story, but the starting point is full of humanistic care and compassion.
We can also understand that the influx of large numbers of immigrants has indeed put enormous pressure on the security of European society. These people, whether before or after immigration, are facing various shocks: after all, Europe is lined with dozens of countries, large and small, ethnic, religious, border disputes are complex, and full of intertwined cultural, historical and social factors.
Similar to "Three Billboards," the heroine of "Out of Thin Air" seems politically incorrect—one can only be at peace with the world, and the other can only survive with revenge.
However, even if film works cannot directly act on society, "Out of Thin Air" strives to make its own deafening voice: Is there anything we can do about the tragedy of new immigrants? (Text/Zhu Qiqi)