I was going to give only 5 but in retrospect, it's worth a 6. Went to see the re-edited version of the film at the Zurich Film Festival. Dieter was kind enough to put me on his guest list ;-)
This version is NOT the one most people saw at the Berlinale in 2002. They took the original material, added a few extra scenes, a whole new soundtrack and new cut. It helps, and made the movie a bit more easy to understand but still not good enough. The movie's biggest weakness is the poor sound quality of dialogs. 1. it's dubbed, since most of the actors are polish and spoke polish. The English voice-over is poor, because it's spoken by polish actors who speak English. Come on... if you lip-sync a movie ANYWAY, why don't you just use real English speakers? It sounded like C-series Chinese kung-fu movie, dubbed English. 2. On top of that, the quality of audio was very very bad and I couldn't make out most of what they said. No subtitles either..
Another problem, I don't think the actors were good. There was no arc to any character. It was all very chaotic.
On the flipside... music sound quality was excellent and filled with Yello's latest tracks. (Actually, I would have liked more of that!)
Dieter is a great visionary, and I can see what he was TRYING to show here. How music can fill even the darkest places with light. It's a nice story with HUGE potential.
Dieter, if you're reading this: my advice: re-shoot it. Keep it a small, low budget indie project.... There are so many talented young movie people out there. Throw away the old material, and start over. It's worth it!
