Berlin Calling

Hannes Stöhr's Berlin Calling premiered on the Piazza Grande at the 2008 Locarno Film Festival and went on to an extraordinary afterlife in Germany, where it ran in some cinemas for years and became the defining screen portrait of the city's techno culture. Its secret weapon is its lead: the electronic musician Paul Kalkbrenner, cast as the DJ Ickarus and scoring the film himself, his track Sky and Sand turning into a club anthem in its own right.

The film follows Ickarus at the peak of a career built on nonstop touring and chemical fuel, with his girlfriend and manager Mathilde (Rita Lengyel) holding the operation together and Corinna Harfouch as the clinic doctor who enters his orbit. Stöhr shot in real Berlin venues with a documentary looseness, and the soundtrack — pulsing, melancholic, propulsive — does as much narrative work as the dialogue, anchoring the story in the actual texture of the scene rather than a tourist's idea of it.

Critics noted the rawness Kalkbrenner brought to a role mapped closely onto his own world, and the film has only grown in stature as a cult object, the rare music movie that insiders and outsiders both claim. For anyone curious about the sound that made Berlin a global capital of electronic music, it remains the essential fiction — affectionate, unglamorous, and shot through with the comedown that always follows the high.