In a key scene in Benjamin Heisenberg's Sleeper, the lead character, a German virologist named Johannes Mehrveldt, is cornered by a woman. The subject of their agitated discussion is a man with whom Mehrveldt will soon begin working.
'You were in his flat, weren't you? Did you notice he's got his windows taped shut? Did he tell you what he brought back from his last trip home?' He tries to escape the interrogation, but can't. 'I know. You want to do the right thing. You want to be one of the good guys. That's why I came to you. You've got integrity. Your motives are right. Mr Merveldt, help us find out what Mr Madani is really like. You only stand to win, and Mr Madani will be lucky that you're doing it instead of someone else.'
It might sound like some- thing out of a movie about East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, when the Stasi went around coaxing the population to become informers. Sleeper, however, is set in the present: Mehrveldt is a researcher at a Munich university, and the woman, Frau Wasser, a shady figure from the German Secret Service. Madani, meanwhile, is everything Mehrveldt and Wasser are
not: outgoing, amicable and aspirational, someone hardly likely to become a suspect of any major heinous crimes. Just one thing is enough to bring the young man into the books of the secret service: he's of Algerian ancestry.
Sleeper, an Austrian-German production that showed in the Un Certain Regard competition at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is one of a series of films that revolves around the wave of mistrust sweeping Europe today. According to Michael Muller-Verweyen, director of Goethe-Institut Hong Kong, having 'suspicious minds is a connecting topic of recent productions in German, Austrian and Swiss filmmaking'. It's something the Max! film festival, the annual showcase of films presented by the institute (along with the Austrian and Swiss consulates), will try to illustrate this year. Heisenberg's film looks at the fear brought on by the so-called war on terrorism.
Political developments in the three German-speaking countries mirror the landscape the filmmakers present in their works. These include the endorsement of tougher immigration laws in Switzerland; last month's Austrian elections that ushered in a new centre-left government and a larger share of votes for the far-right Freedom Party; and the plummeting popularity of Angela Merkel's coalition in Germany.
