26/10/2022 - Fatih Akin's film about rapper Xatar is masterfully shot but loses focus as it tells its character’s real-life story — from Kurdish refugee, to cynical criminal, to German hip hop star

From a shop in the streets of the ghetto, to cocaine trafficking, to prison for robbery, and from there to ascension in the world of rap music. This isn’t Straight Outta Compton, but Rheingold [+see also:
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film profile] by Fatih Akin, which premiered at the Hamburg Film Festival in early October before making its way to the Rome Film Fest and finally landing in German cinemas on 27 October via Warner Bros. Entertainment Germania. Rheingold is adapted from the book Alles oder Nix: Bei uns sagt man, die Welt gehört dir (All or nothing: As they say, the world is yours), published in 2015 by successful Bonn-based rapper Giwar Hajabi aka Xatar, who today is not only one of the biggest stars of German rap, but also a successful entrepreneur and restaurateur.

The autobiography, and the film, tell the story of his rather eventful life, from his birth in a cave full of bats (Giwar means "born in suffering”) in a village in the north of Iran from Kurdish parents, musicians fleeing Khomeini's fatwa who then joined Kurdish resistance fighters and were arrested before escaping to Paris with the help of the Red Cross; his arrival aged three in Bonn, where his father accepts the position of conductor at the opera; the separation of his parents, the sale of hashish and bootleg VHS porn, fights with the Turkish people of the neighborhood, his initial interest in the hip-hop scene of Bonn, the large cocaine traffic ring, his escape to Amsterdam, his relations with the ruthless Kurdish mafia in the Netherlands and the night club surveillance business; his return to Germany and, finally, the robbery of a van that secretly transports the gold teeth that gravediggers from all over Germany steal from the dead. Sentenced to 8 years, Xatar (ie "the dangerous") records his first successful album in jail, with a dictaphone smuggled into the prison.

This biopic of a war refugee who becomes a cynical and opportunistic criminal and, finally, an inspired rapper who recounts his difficult existence in his songs, could not be put into better hands than those of Akin, a German director with a Turkish background who signed in 2019 the disturbing film The Golden Glove [+see also:
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interview: Fatih Akin
interview: Jonas Dassler
film profile], which tells the deeds of the Hamburg serial killer Fritz Honka. But Akin seems much more at ease in the first part of the film, which recounts a young boy’s expulsion, his escape, the loss of his home and cultural identity, and the following descent into criminality of those who, like him, feel they have nothing to lose. In the later parts of this film, which is shot masterfully, in numerous locations and in different formats — from 4:3 to standard to Cinemascope — and edited along different temporal levels, Akin nevertheless seems “lost in transposition.” The encounters between criminals, the dialogues and certain situations, the attitude and the look of Xatar himself, as played by Emilio Sakraya (Kiano in the Netflix series Tribes of Europa [+see also:
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series profile], EFP's Shooting Star this year - watch interview), sink into cliché. Divided into short chapters marked by on-screen text indicating the dates and the cities where the action takes place, Rheingold in fact looks like three different films. The parts dedicated to the attempted international cocaine traffic ring and the famous €1.7 million robbery (the gold was never found) transform the film into a sort of Guy Ritchie-like heist comedy (but without entertainment of Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), so clumsy the protagonists seem. An in-depth study of the protagonist's involvement in the multi-ethnic musical genre par excellence would perhaps have made the film's parable more focused and engaging.

Rheingold was produced by Bombero International in co-production with Warner Bros. Film Productions Germany, Palosanto Films with Rai Cinema, Lemming Film, Corazón International. International sales are handled by The Match Factory.

(Translated from Italian)