Kicking off next week is the first part of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and today we’re pleased to share the exclusive first teaser at an anticipated premiere in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section, which explores new German cinema. Directed by David Vajda and Saša Vajda, Jesus Egon Christus follows a Egon, a sleepless psychotic and oddball, who encounters the messiah and a group of addicts at an evangelical parish in the Berlin countryside. As he takes Jesus at his word during the medium-length docu-fiction hybrid, his mental state gradually disintegrates.
“We spent two years researching, collecting stories and casting people at methadone clinics, needle exchanges and in the streets of our neighbourhood in Berlin-Neukölln, where drug addiction and mental health issues are ubiquitous,” the director said in a statement. “Our psychotic main character Egon is loosely based on an existing heroin-addicted insomniac we met along the way. Our research also took us to evangelical rehab facilities, where a lack of therapeutic support, strict routines and simple answers to complex questions make for a very unstable environment. In these places, the long and arduous road to sobriety is presented with what appears to be an easy solution. Jesus becomes a form of substitution.”
Watch our exclusive teaser premiere below.
Jesus Egon Christus premieres at Berlinale.