Roland Klick - The Heart is a Hungry Hunter

"He was a dreamer inside a German – not an easy thing to be!" recalls actor David Hess about director Roland Klick, in whose 1983 film "White Star" he appeared.

Klick made this film, as he tells Sandra Prechtel in her documentary, in order to get over his Waterloo: widely regarded as the great white hope of German cinema at the time, Klick had recently been ousted as director of the film "Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo". With their bid to abolish the "ostensible contradiction of art and box-office" Klick and producer Bernd Eichinger should have been a dream team but they fell out over their conflicting ideas about working with "children" Eichinger was not convinced by Klick’s personal approach.

Klick is still all for the personal approach; in "The Heart is a Hungry Hunter" this director who defies all categories reveals himself as humorous and far from embittered. Excerpts from his films and comments from contemporaries such as Eva Mattes, Otto Sander and Hark Bohm round off this portrait of a class-conscious director; a man for whom film was not about "telling those up there about those down there", but who also made his films for those who otherwise probably don’t give a hoot for cinema.

Source: 63. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)