02/10/2025 - The feature debut by German writer-director duo Nicolai Zeitler and Marlene Bischof places the focus on various protagonists who are feeling overwhelmed by life

The anthology film I Am the Greatest, a joint effort by screenwriting-directing duo Nicolai Zeitler and Marlene Bischof, has made its debut in the “Große Freiheit” section for German films at Filmfest Hamburg. The two have already shot short films and adverts together, and they have remained true to the spirit of short filmmaking in their first feature, as the movie consists of seven independent episodes, all of which deal with people who are under stress in their everyday lives and are struggling to cope with being overwhelmed.

External events and internal experiences flow into one another, and all of the protagonists are united in expressing their experience of the world through strong emotions. A young man is rudely jostled by a passerby on a crowded pavement, and he acts out his reaction to this in his imagination and thoughts as he continues on his way. For young Marie, played by European Shooting Star Katharina Stark, who lives in a shared flat, her first date with a guy she has just met at the disco spirals into pure stress. Her fears, her self-esteem brought down by psychological problems, and her strong longing for a relationship accompany her on her date. Real-life action and her inner life blur into scenes straddling dream and reality. A young father playing with his toddler in a playground is also drowning in self-doubt; his perception of the other children and their parents condenses into Kafkaesque, dream-like thoughts.

The leitmotif uniting all of the episodes is that their protagonists experience their lives as mental overload. They want to be strong, they want to be themselves, and they want to be loved and seen, but self-doubt and fears of failure, loss and loneliness gnaw away at them. Karsten, played by well-known German TV and film actor Max Waschke, bombs down the motorway at breakneck speed, always at full throttle, to his next appointment. The project manager lives life in the fast lane, following the motto “if you snooze, you lose”. Convinced that nothing will work without him, he has to be in control of everything. And yet he dreams of throwing it all away. Finally, a woman who has separated from her husband after many years of marriage is also searching for inner peace, but the anger inside her keeps on bubbling up.

I Am the Greatest, the title of which alludes to the famous Muhammad Ali biography of the same name, which is, of course, meant to be ironic, uses a dense and concentrated mise-en-scène in some of its episodes. Some elements seem overly exaggerated, almost like caricatures, which is most probably due to the short-film-like structure. In a typical feature film, the characters would need to be more nuanced, as some of them seem overly stereotypical here.

Nicolai Zeitler and Marlene Bischof have made a remarkable debut with this feature, which is a co-production between Munich-based Berghaus & Wöbke Produktion, ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel, ARTE and the Munich-based Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (HFF).