Director's Commentary
LILIAN FRANCK ON HER AND ROBERT CIBIS' FILM "FUCK FAME"
»As the daughter of a psychologist, I have repeatedly dealt with the limits of mental health on film ("Das Glück aus der Dose" (2009), "Clemi flüchtet" (1994), "Cora" (2000) etc.). Already in the two documentaries "Omen. 15 hours Tekkno" (1994) and "Supermerle" (1997) I already dealt with the party culture of escapist youth. Mental illness and drugs seem to be part of the singing career. The psychiatrist Borwin Bandelow even declared on the occasion of the death of Whitney Houston: "It was not fame that made the singer a psychic wreck – it was her illness that made success possible in the first place.“
In Uffie's case, excessive parties, her bipolar disorder and her drug addiction combine to form a death wish. Again and again she tries to fight it. I still remember a romanticised longing for death from my own teenage years. The members of Club 27 – a group of stars who all died at the age of 27, e.g. the musicians Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison – were role models. That feeling is still present in my mind. At that time it was about escaping from everyday life, its constraints, from society. Uffie embodies my feeling from back then with a radicalism that I would have admired earlier. But now I look at it with other, worried eyes, and together with Uffie I fear for her future. A future that I hope that today's teenagers, my children, will make it worth living for themselves. As an 'adult' I would like to make a small contribution to this with this film. If the viewer has understood a young person at the end of the film who challenges death and behaves irresponsibly towards himself and others, then he has come a little closer to this generation and its problems and can then act.«
Lilian Franck