Alki Alki

Tobias (Heiko Pinkowski) and ‘Flasche’ (Peter Trabner) are friends for life. They haven't spent a day apart since their youth. Tobias is in the prime of his life, responsible for his wife Annika (Christina Große) and their children. And yet he doesn't seem to be growing up. He rocks the nightclubs with his bottle, drinking all night - then lies in bed hungover during the day. However, the carefree lightness of youth has long since evaporated. Tobias is increasingly at odds with his wife and his partner Thomas (Thorsten Merten), with whom he has founded an architecture firm. Tobias loses his driver's license, jobs at the office, his love life with his wife and the joy of his children due to alcohol. In the end, he even causes a dangerous car accident... Tobias realizes that it is now time to break away from his friendship with Flasche and go his own way. But is it perhaps already too late? Robert Gwisdek, Iris Berben and Oliver Korittke complete this almost fairytale-like tragicomedy about an alcoholic's gradual loss of reality, bursting with imagination and the art of improvisation. "The film achieves [...] what not only German films do far too rarely: it skillfully combines a supposedly taboo subject with humor. What could easily have tipped over into the transfiguring or hopelessly silly, in combination with Ranisch's own anarchic sound, becomes a completely relaxed examination of the subject of addiction. The trio of authors have mastered a difficult balancing act: a tragicomedy that is great fun and never betrays its characters. [...] ‘Alki Alki’ succeeds in creating strong, unspent images, whereby the charms of intoxication are not missing in the film." (Kaspar Heinrich, in DER SPIEGEL)