Christiane F.

Christiane F. (1981) is set in West Berlin at the end of the seventies. Christiane, thirteen, starts going to a nightclub, moves through that scene into heroin, and ends up working as a prostitute around Zoo Station to pay for it. The film shows the descent step by step and explains nothing. The source is the 1978 book Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. It is not fiction; it is a transcript of interviews the journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck conducted with Christiane Felscherinow. David Bowie appears as himself and most of the music is his. The concert scene is staged as if in Berlin but was actually shot at a nightclub in New York and spliced with AC/DC concert footage taken in West Germany. Most of the cast were first time performers still at school. Natja Brunckhorst, who plays the lead, was the only one who went on acting in German film and television. Scenes of drug use and sex filmed with children could not be made under today's laws. It was shot in 1980 on a 2.7 million dollar budget and, with around 4.6 million admissions, became the most watched West German film of its year. It became a cult film across Europe and put youth heroin addiction into public discussion. It runs 131 minutes. Good for: hard realism about addiction, Berlin, and Bowie. Less good for: the drug use, child prostitution and withdrawal scenes are extremely heavy. The film offers no consolation and tells no recovery story. That some of it was filmed with children is a separate source of discomfort now.