Follow Me (1989)

A poetic attempt to show the state of mind of people critical of the regime in Prague who vacillate between their love of their homeland and their desire to emigrate, illustrated by the example of a philosophy professor who has to work as a gravedigger and luggage transporter at the airport.

Date of release
1989-11-02
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 44m
Genres
Drama
Director
Maria Knilli

Casting

Interesting facts

Follow Me is a 1989 East-West drama film directed by the Austrian filmmaker Maria Knilli. It was her second feature film, following her feature film debut with Lieber Karl released in 1984. Follow Me was entered as the official German contribution into the competition of the 16th Moscow International Film Festival in 1989 and had its world premiere there. It was released theatrically in German cinemas on 2 November 1989, one week before the fall of the Berlin Wall. 1990, following the Velvet Revolution, the film was shown at the 27th International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary.

Production

Maria Knilli had been concerned with emigrants since 1983. The impetus to this project had been her encounter with the Czech actor Pavel Landovský who, having been one of the initiators of the petition Charter 77, had been expelled from his home country. He told Knilli about how he once travelled to a shooting from Vienna to Helsinki and was the only passenger who had to stay seated in the plane during its stopover in Prague.

Knilli began writing the screenplay in the summer of 1985 and worked on it for over two years, together with the DEFA-filmmaker Ulrich Weiß, whose co-authorship had long been concealed for political reasons by the alias Vera Has. A typical trademark of Weiß' is the abstinence of any ideology and the universally human point of view.

Follow Me was shot in 1988 and completed in 1989. The lead actor Pavel Landovský had been a member of the Wiener Burgtheater and starred in many cinema and television films following his emigration to Austria. Knilli had met him in 1983 when she was working as an assistant director for the Czech filmmaker Vojtěch Jasný during the shooting of the television play See you later, I must shoot myself.

While shooting this film in Helsinki, Knilli also got to know the French actress of Russian descent Marina Vlady who starred together with Landovský and the Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski. Vlady later wrote in her memoirs about Follow Me: „The script is one of the best I had read in years. It’s full of poetry, a poetry of images, a poetry of human relationships.“

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