The Baader Meinhof Complex

Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex (German: Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) opened in Germany in September 2008 and arrived as one of the most ambitious productions of the post-reunification German film industry, a €13.5 million Constantin Film production written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, the same producer-screenwriter who had brought Hitler's bunker to the screen in Downfall three years earlier. Edel, a New German Cinema graduate of the 1970s who had directed Christiane F. in 1981, was reuniting with Eichinger after almost three decades. The screenplay is adapted from Stefan Aust's 1985 non-fiction work of the same name, itself the product of Aust's tenure as Der Spiegel editor and one of the most exhaustively reported books in modern German history.

The cast assembles a cross-generation snapshot of contemporary German screen acting: Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run) as Andreas Baader, Martina Gedeck (The Lives of Others) as Ulrike Meinhof, Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, with Bruno Ganz as the head of the federal criminal police office and Nadja Uhl, Stipe Erceg and Heino Ferch in supporting roles. Cinematographer Rainer Klausmann (Head-On, The Edukators) shoots the period in a granular sixteen-millimetre-derived register; production designer Bernd Lepel rebuilt sequences across Berlin, Munich and Czech locations.

The film took €11 million at the German box office, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the BAFTA in the same category at the 81st and 62nd ceremonies respectively, and remains the most widely seen feature treatment of the German Autumn. Critical opinion in Germany itself was divided (historians debated the compression of dates and dialogue) but it is now standard reference viewing in modern-history courses across Europe.