It's true people usually thank any kind of information about skinheads and punks that stand apart from the usual 10 o'clock news report. I saw this film in a German Festival and had the chance to listen to one of the directors talk about his film. No matter what he thinks I believe the film is biased in the sense that apart from the characters that we are supposed to find interesting(the skinheads, the punks, all male) the rest are portrayed as absurd, unintelligent, superficial... the parents, the teacher, the girlfriends, the girlfriends' parents...everyone except the three main characters are totally dumb and when one of the girls decides to take a stand against her boyfriend's unacceptable demeanor considering he's a father already it is too late...we don't care what anyone else does apart from Koma and Janosch(and personally, not even them). There's an interesting part regarding Janosch getting involved with a punk(by the way, there are no gay skinheads-they are blatantly homophobic, it's punks that are accepting of gay behaviour) but this only starts way until the last part of the film, and eventually neither that nor a good camera work can save it from it's dullness and lack of orientation(irt doesn't work as a drama, it is not a documentary). The director said at the ending of the Q&A session what he really likes about the story is that "this boy decides to not stay at home with his parents watching television and runs away to live life"...well, I don't know why anyone might consider that losing all individuality to join a group of nonthinking violent white males who won't argument a single thing they do because they can't is a better choice than staying home or studying. One thing is living life, another thing is destroying other people's. The fact that we are not given one clue about why Janosch runs away from his parents because it should be OBVIOUS that it is what anyone that age would want to do doesn't help...the fact that we have to take so many things for granted as if we and the directors have led the same life and share the same conceptions of what it is or should be is nothing less than egotistic. Do not misunderstand me, it is not a nazi film of any kind and the last reflection left for us is of much humanity(though a bit trite) but the fact that if you have not been a skin or lived around them(like the directors) you will be treated as an outsider by the film; you will not connect to the fact that," well, skinheads talk much less than in the film, it's already inaccurate because Koma wouldn't make any single speech in real life" so we shouldn't ask for more depht in the characters because the directors had already sacrificed silence for the sake of dramatization....wrong! One thing is that that skinheads might never think about the causes of their violent behaviour and an entirely different thing would be that there weren't any. The directors missed that cinematic point where certain images speak more than a thousand words.
