The German first-time writer/director talks about the true events the inspired the film, the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” and how they found out about the coincidence of sharing titles with Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl.
http://moveablefest.com/moveable_fest/2014/06/katrin-gebbe-nothing-bad -can-happen.html
I cannot find anywhere what the actual incident is that she is referring to. She gives a hint in this article, but does anyone know the actual names/locations/dates here? It's kind of driving me nuts that every article about this film mentions that it's based on true events and then no one bothers to try to figure it out.
shareI believe the german law is very strict when it comes to protecting sensitive personal data and thus, mentioning names or publically attaching certain events to certain people can be punishable. In this case, the director isn't very clear about the incident that inspired her, probably because it's forbidden to be explicit about it, giving names and dates for example, that could harm (the reputation of?) actual living people related to the incident in one way or another.
Any germans out there to clarify this?
I don't know about the facts behind the film's story, but I have some paragraphs from the jesus freaks own website:
http://jesusfreaks.de/tag/tore-tanzt/
Here it is written that the their group's role in the movie was entirely fictional,
and that it is based on a news report about a married couple that has kept a mentally handicapped boy in their cellar and tortured him to death over a couple of months.
((Fiktive Rolle der Jesus Freaks in „Tore tanzt“: Inspiriert wurde der Film „Tore tanzt“ von einer Meldung über ein Ehepaar, das einen geistig behinderten Junge über Monate im Keller gefangen gehalten und zu Tode gequält hat.))
In an interview with dpa (german news agency) the director says, that she felt a need to counter the film's brutality with something poetic, transcendental. This was supposed to be Tore, his belief, his good heart. Katrin Gebbe was looking for a religious community of current times that includes especially younger folk, and she remembered the Jesus Freaks which she had encountered earlier on some unspecified concert.
((In einem Interview mit der dpa erzählt die Regisseurin Katrin Gebbe:
„Als ich zum Film recherchiert habe, hatte ich das Bedürfnis der Brutalität der Geschichte etwas Poetisches, Transzendentes entgegensetzen zu müssen. Dieser andere Pol sollte Tore sein, sein Glaube, sein gutes Herz. Ich fand die katholische Kirche aber durch die negativen Schlagzeilen der letzten Jahre zu vorbelastet und habe deswegen überlegt, zu welchen ‘modernen’ Glaubens-Gemeinschaften junge Menschen dazugehören können. Da fielen mir die Jesus Freaks ein, die ich früher mal mit einem Stand auf einem Konzert bemerkt hatte.“))
Jesus Freaks Deutschland e.V. point out explicitly that the (film's) relation to the Jesus Freaks group is entirely fictional and not according to facts.
((Jesus Freaks Deutschland e.V. weisen daher ausdrücklich darauf hin, dass der Bezug zu den Jesus Freaks fiktiv ist und nicht der Wahrheit entspricht.))