THE HERO – Cultural Initiative 08/16

A heartfelt comedy about history as myth, the pitfalls of German memory culture, and life as a game of remembering, forgetting, and inventing. An enjoyable lesson on the hierarchy of historiography and a film about the power of storytelling.

A Berlin video store owner on the brink of bankruptcy inadvertently becomes a national hero when a journalist portrays him as the mastermind behind the largest mass escape from East Germany on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – which is not true, but he can't manage to set the record straight.

Michael Hartung, the owner of a debt-ridden Berlin video store, receives an unexpected visitor: a journalist working on a report about the largest mass escape from East Germany for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has discovered Hartung's name in old Stasi files during his research. He is said to have orchestrated the escape of 127 people through Friedrichstraße station as an employee of the East German railway. Initially, Hartung denies everything, but in light of a substantial fee, he is tempted to confirm the story. Soon, he is celebrated as a hero in all media. And then Hartung falls in love with Paula, who as a child was on the S-Bahn train heading to West Berlin that he supposedly redirected…