Tough Love

The film gives the life of the Berlin karate champion Andreas Marquardt both through his own account and through staged scenes. As a child he was beaten by his father and sexually abused by his mother; as a grown man he became a pimp and was himself violent towards women. The account holds two things at once: what was done to him as a child and what he did once he was grown. After prison he went into treatment, began again with the woman who stayed with him through all of it, and today teaches karate to children and works against child abuse. The form, moving between documentary and reenactment, does not present the man’s own voice as the single truth. Hanno Koffler and Luise Heyer appear in Rosa von Praunheim’s eighty nine minute production, completed in 2015.