A German Youth

At the end of the sixties in West Germany the post-war generation rose against its own parents. This was a generation sickened by anti-communist capitalism and by what it believed was a fascist streak inside the state apparatus. The journalist Ulrike Meinhof, the lawyer Horst Mahler, the filmmaker Holger Meins and the students Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader came out of it. Jean-Gabriel Périot's documentary is built entirely from the archive of that period: television footage, agitprop films made by students, panel discussions and pieces of the cinema of the time. There is not one newly shot image in it and no narrator speaking from outside. The film neither absolves the violence of the Red Army Faction nor simplifies it; it watches how a political anger turned into an armed organisation, using that anger's own documents. It screened at the 2015 Berlinale.