Our Pop Up Film Haus events are free and open to the public. Each film will be shown with English subtitles and there will be an opportunity for discussion following each screening.

Goethe Pop Up Kansas City welcomes all to join us this week for a screening of Hans-Christian Schmid’s film "23".

"23"
Germany 1998, 99 min
By: Hans-Christian Schmid
With: August Diehl, Fabian Busch, Dieter Landuris

Summary:

Based on an authentic case, the film 23 tells the story of Karl Koch, a computer hacker from Hanover, who loses his life at the end of the 1980s. Karl Koch is 19, when he leaves home to get away from the overbearing influence of his ultra-conservative father. After this equally sensitive as well as rebellious young man reads Robert Wilson’s cult book lluminatus!, he noticeably falls into imagining that the world is now controlled by a secret organization of Illuminati.

One day the two crooks Lupo and Pepe talk both Karl and his friend David into using their hacker skills in order to get their hands on some top secret information and sell it to the KGB for lots of money. Yet, Karl is not up to the unrelenting pressure. He begins to take drugs, isolating himself ever more from his surroundings. His delusions of Illuminati now become transformed into a full-blown paranoia. A sensation-seeking journalist finally notices Karl – followed a little while later also by the police.

Source: filmportal.de

Discussion Topics:

Philipp Eirich, IT-specialist in Kansas City, will do an introduction of the movie and lead a discussion afterwards. He will focus on the beginnings of the internet and how conspiracy theories make it into the mainstream through social media.

This event is part of the German Cinema in the Crossroads film series, an extension of the Wunderbar: A Celebration of German Film project. From "Beloved Sisters" to "A Coffee in Berlin" and "Young Goethe in Love", from "The Blue Angel" to "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" – we are celebrating German-American friendship with our partner Kanopy by bringing 48 German films to your screens. Goethe-Instituts and Goethe Pop-Ups across the U.S. will take part in the celebration by showing films, organizing film festivals, and conducting discussions after screenings.