The Last Berliner

Director's Statement

Director's Note It was August 1989 and I was incredibly proud. My father opened the bathroom door to reveal his work: A freshly tiled bathroom, new fittings, and - most importantly - a completely embedded corner bathtub. I’d never seen anything like it, neither had any of my friends. Not at that time, not in East Germany. My parents never had much money, but my father was a plumber and knew people and the bathtub had been exchanged for a few “blaue Fliesen” (“blue tiles”), which was a code for the precious West German money. A few months later, the Berlin Wall fell and we had to leave the house with the beautiful bathroom as a result of a claim to re-transfer - and rightly so. I didn't understand it back then and I didn't want to leave. Here, I had my own room, a creepy but beautiful attic to play in and a huge garden with a tree house. And now we were told to leave. For me as a 7-year-old, it cut me to the quick, I can only imagine how my father must have felt. Just a month after we’d moved out, the brand-new bathroom was torn out and replaced by a posh winter garden. Today, the house is a prohibitively expensive villa, but in those days, it housed three families and the bullet holes it had received during the war were still clearly visible. It was precisely this feeling, the feeling of being torn out of your familiar environment, this helplessness, because the old owners of course had every right to take back their house - this very feeling triggered me when I started developing the material for THE LAST BERLINER. That awful uneasiness when you know something is right and it still doesn't feel fair. Today, of course, tenants are forced to leave their beloved homes for very different reasons, but that doesn’t change the way it feels, does it? Doesn’t it feel exactly the same for an old Berlin tenant to suddenly have to leave his apartment after 40 years? When the new tenants are just half as old as the rental contracts the old tenants had? What I particularly like about the material is that the unwieldy subject of “gentrification” suddenly receives some emotional figures and both sides get to have their say. It was also very important for me to not simply use the topic as a “vehicle”. Evictions are not followed by the start of a new life, a trip to the seaside or possibly some heist film in which estate agents are under attack. The material remains rooted in the subject, even throughout its finale and twist. Tobias’s only option is to flee because lofts have been secretly built in place of social housing complexes. The SWAT team can’t storm at first, because the bathroom window was bricked up as the new owners’ way of getting the tenant out. Tobias only has a gas bottle, because the actual heating is out of order, and the estate agent can’t escape because the door hasn’t been repaired. One of the most tragic moments in the film is drowned out by deafening construction noise. And even for the percussion of the movie’s marvelous soundtrack by Rutger Hoedemaekers, demolition waste from newly renovated houses was used. For me as a filmmaker, the viewer’s emotional journey while watching the film, the entertainment value and suspense are my top priorities. I love a moving camera that remains very close to the characters and connects the SWAT scenes homogeneously with the apartment scenes instead of separating them from one another. I like that the movie starts by showing the vastness of the big city before being reduced to a narrower, claustrophobic and darker view, almost in real time. Even if the film is set in a German city during daylight hours, camera and light are used more like in a Scandinavian thriller. We put all our passion and experience into making this chamber-play-like thriller that is consistent and surprising alike, never leaving the viewer out. There’s no moralizing undertone, no emotional drama, but a gripping, stirring film that will have audiences biting their nails. It’s reduced to the vital parts, with a heightened focus, and the reductions should be understood as a stylistic device. There are only few, selected, good settings. The cast is small but highly talented. The visual language is captivating and fresh, always close to the people, close to the action. I am convinced that we have shot a great, emotional, and very relevant film with very limited means, and autarchic funding. Almost daily, I read newspaper articles, see news excerpts, and read blogs that precisely describe the fates we see in the film. This film concerns everyone directly or indirectly and the marginalization of old milieus is happening worldwide. Berlin, London, or New York, the place doesn’t matter. During our research, we met with many affected tenants, but also estate agents, and all the measures of eviction described in the book are real. After studying at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, I returned to my hometown, Berlin and I live in the Prenzlauer-Berg neighborhood, which indirectly makes me part of the gentrification. Nevertheless, or rather, because of that, I have turned this book into a film, and I would like to give the feeling that I had as a child and all the people affected their very own film. Gregor Erler (director & writer, September 2018)