Hamburg Lectures (2006)
Hamburg Lectures (2006) German director Romuald Karmakar focuses on two sermon lectures given by Mohammed Fazazi, Imam of a mosque in Hamburg/Germany. The two lectures, in which Fazazi was speaking about the Islamic holy war against unbelievers, on video tape and was circulated circuitously in radical Islamic circles.
Karmakar translated the lectures into German had them read by the actor Manfred Zapatka. Zapatka, in his reading does not try to “play” Fazazi, nor does he impose a personal interpretation. He speaks in front of a neutral background with no image of a mosque. This starkness obliges the spectator has to concentrate on the content of the lectures and to focus on the paradox and the dangerous “logic” of the Islamist ideology. At the end, this a commentary that some of the 9/11 terrorists had visited Fazazi and his mosque during their stay in Hamburg.
Tobias Ebbrecht, Film and Television Academy ‘Konrad Wolf” mediacritique@web.de
