A Big Grey-Blue Bird

In his directorial debut, Thomas Schamoni tells a complexly constructed story, which remains enigmatic, about a "world domination formula". Poet Tom-X (Klaus Lemke) meets the tramp and former scientist Belotti, who developed the formula with four colleagues. According to Belotti, it was encoded in a poem, but he only knows a single verse of it. When Belotti dies a short time later, Tom-X sets out to find the four other scientists. But he's not the only one: numerous agents seem to be chasing the secret of the formula. Whether these are just figments of Tom-X's poetic imagination, however, remains uncertain. “Schamoni questions the position of the film director, the truthfulness of filmed reality and its always fictional character, “imagined” through a certain perspective; he plays off dream and reality, imagination and reality, past and present, projection and real action against each other. He does this in images of irresistible charm, in an artificial, intelligent and ironic puzzle that carelessly mixes up all the topoi of a good thriller.” (Wolf Donner, in: Die Zeit) "There are some interesting sounds in it. In the film there are these people spying on each other, and they have these electronic instruments and screens they’re working with. And for the sound in the film I recorded lots of shortwave sounds and turned them into sound design. I brought these sounds I had edited to the studio, and Can played to them. Then I edited them back into the film, and these sounds became music, and then they became reality again, and that was very interesting as sound design work." (Interview with CAN's Irmin Schmidt, on: screenslate.com)