Friendship!

Colour, 35 mm
Germany, 2009, 108 min
Section: Variety Critics’ Choice

Synopsis

Two naive young East Germans hit the Stateside asphalt after the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 in Friendship! When the opportunity comes to travel abroad, the two go-getters decide to journey to San Francisco, where Veit’s father supposedly escaped to a decade earlier. Unfortunately, the two bright young optimists have only enough money to fly to Gotham, where, after telling passport control they’re not Nazis but communists ("Friendship!” they cry), they’re hauled into a back room and body-searched. Worse, they then realize their $55 will only get them as far as New Jersey, so they decide to hitch – initially with wacko Darryl to his hometown in Tennessee. Though the pair have only limited English, and even less knowledge of the U.S., the script soon soft-pedals linguistic and cultural misunderstanding as its main source of humor.