Part of Music City Mondays
Adapted from actress and musician Cristiane Felscherinow’s harrowing account of her teenage years, CHRISTIANE F. depicts the impact of West Berlin’s mid-to-late-’70s heroin epidemic on one of its youngest and luckiest survivors. On the cusp of 14, David Bowie-worshipping Cristiane (Natja Brunckhorst) begins slipping out from under the watch of her divorced mother (Christiane Lechle) and spending time at hip discotheque Sound. There she falls in love with Detlev (Thomas Haustein), whose recent experiments with heroin soon have her hooked. Working with first-time actors and shooting on location with real-life regulars of Zoo Station’s notorious drug cruising scene, director Uli Edel unflinchingly captures the degradation of each phase of junkie life, from underage prostitution to brutal withdrawals to the seemingly endless vows to “go straight.” Bowie himself appears in a concert performance of “Station to Station” — and the film’s soundtrack is a virtual compendium of the epochal musician’s celebrated “Berlin period” and a perfect sonic evocation of nightclubbing’s dark side.
“The images are so powerful, the horrors so strong and the performances (by a cast of young unknowns) so utterly, bleakly, realistic.” —Roger Ebert (1982)
“CHRISTIANE F., the 1981 cult classic nightmare vision of a teen girl’s descent into heroin addiction in West Berlin, makes even THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK look like a walk in the, well, you know.” —Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire