In the 1980s, Petra Kelly was a prominent figure in the Green Party and a passionate peace activist. Her tragic end came in 1992 when she was shot in her sleep by her partner, former German army general Gert Bastian, who then took his own life. Thomas Imbach's film HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN tells this story in an unusual way. The film does not begin with the lives of the protagonists, but with their deaths. Petra and Gert find themselves in a glass transit room in a modern airport – an artificial limbo between life and death. There they try to reconstruct their past and understand the meaning of their last moments together. In his work, Imbach combines documentary-style scenes with fictional acting and archive material. This mixture creates a narrative structure that unravels Petra and Gert's love story from the end. The film experiments with surreal leaps between past and future, this world and the next, similar to the thrillers of David Lynch. The result is a captivating, intense chamber drama with unusual perspectives. HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2001, where it was nominated for the Golden Leopard. The film won the Zurich Film Award in 2001 and was nominated for the Swiss Film Award in the categories Best Feature Film and Best Actress.

Keywords

• biopic
• relationship

Actors

• Linda Olsansky
• Herbert Fritsch
• Angelika Waller
• Sir Henry
• Ingrid Sattes

Director

• Thomas Imbach