Sunday Warriors

  • maine jff
  • ischia

Sunday Warriors balances with his protagonists between pathos and banality, myth and all day life, play and self-analysis and gives an insight in a world, in which the big human desires of today become visible. An Ode to the play and the phantasy!

Year

2013

Length

90 min

Director

Andreas Geiger

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Hidden in our forest they live almost unnoticed: elves and Orks, warriors and undeads, dark rulers and beautiful shining lights. Every weekend thousands of these weird beings meet for the big game. Martial screams echo through the woods, swords strike together, armies of soldiers trek over the fields and left behind a mass of destruction. The good versus the bad – the everlasting fight.

What sounds like a scenario from „The Lord of the Rings“, is for thousands of actors an exciting reality and means plunging in a world of myths and magic. These live action role-playing games are called LARP, whose process and ending is determined by the actors themselves. There is no audience, they are acting for themselves, are actors and audience at once. Between April and October hundreds of Cons, as the role-playing events are called, take place every weekend. Sometimes a dozen of role players meet, but during “big cons” like the “Conquest of Mythodea” in Brokeloh in Niedersachsen, with about 300 inhabitants, or the “festival of the Dragon” in hessian Diemelstadt, almost 8.000 participants come together. Only Germany counts a role-playing Community of about 250.000 players.

Each player chooses his own character: elf, Ork, prince, beggar, magician, settler, jester, druid, healer, knight, fire being, juggler, goblin, hobbit or vampire are the most popular parts, whose properties can be combined and developed as desired. Many players advance their characters within years, there is no fixed script, improvisation and phantasy are their tools, when the fight to the death begins. It is a world just like in the childhood, when nothing else mattered than playing.

Director
Andreas Geiger

Producer
Georg Tschurtschenthaler

Cinematographer
Axel Schneppat

Editor
Mikael K. Ebbesen

Sound 
Oliver Stahn

Music
Uwe Schenk

Production manager
Nick Pastucha
Rainer Baumert (rbb)

Co-producer
Arash T. Riahi
Michael Seeber
Sabine Gruber

Executive producers
Christian Beetz

Sunday Warriors
Trailer
  • „Just in diesem Moment überraschen uns die aus dem Theaterbereich stammenden jungen Regisseure Hans Block und Moritz Riesewieck mit einem erstaunlichen Dokumentarfilm, der seit Monaten Publikum und Kritik auf den wichtigsten Festivals der Welt elektrisiert. Völlig zu Recht: Es ist, als würden einem die Scheuklappen weggerissen, als sähe man das, was sich seit Jahren direkt vor unseren Augen abspielt, zum ersten Mal unverschleiert... eine fesselnde ,Doku noir' mit höchstem Anspruch...Dieser Film müsste an allen Schulen gezeigt werden.“
    Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
    17.05.2018

In co-production with

  • wdr

In co-production with

  • rbb
  • golden girls

In association with

  • arte

Supported by

  • medienboard
  • Filmförderfonds
  • mfg bawü
  • filmfonds Wien