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Kroko – Macho Mädchen Meets Her Match
By Dorothea Holloway | August 12, 2008
Her real name is Julia, but she prefers “Kroko” – short for “krokodil” (crocodile). A rough-and-tumble street-girl with ice-cold eyes and a temperament to match in Silke Enders’s Kroko (2003), Kroko (Franziska Jünger) is the no-nonsense leader of a gang of shop-lifters in the Berlin-Wedding working-man’s district. All the 16-year-old diva cares about is her flashy clothes, her equally gaudy lifestyle, her cool macho boyfriend Eddie (Hinnerk Schönemann, in a cutting-edge performance), and whatever it takes to get what she wants.
Vain and arrogant, she’s above lending a hand to her mother (Anja Beatrice Kaul, convincing as a working woman who has had hard times), doesn’t approve of her mother’s new boyfriend, and couldn’t care less about helping her younger half-sister Cora (Kimberly Krump) with her homework. This show of bitchy boredom changes on a stroke of fate. Kroko talks a nice guy into letting her drive his car without a license – then promptly guns the motor on a joy ride and hits a biker at a crossing. Though not a very serious accident, it’s enough to land her in juvenile court. Her punishment: two months of welfare work in a project home for the disabled.
Kroko has absolutely no feeling of guilt. Her behavior in the home is like someone arriving from another planet. But the disabled are stronger. They couldn’t care less for Kroko’s rough temper and ignorance. Remarkable, too, how this cutie from the streets is left stranded in the home. “What do you want here?” asks Sabrina (Heidi Bruck). “Nothing!” comes the icy response. Without batting an eye, Sabrina hits right back: “Are you going to clean the place up?” One encounter leads to another, with the “spasti” (spastic disabled) winning hands-down in a showdown with the “normalo”! Indeed, in the company of the “spastis” Kroko is completely helpless.
And it’s a joy to experience how these so-called “disabled” portray their lifestyle with such ease and persuasion. All have stage experience – they belong to the ensemble of the Thikwa Theater in Berlin. To Sylke Enders’s credit the handicapped are not the theme of her film. More often than not, the disabled are presented in a far too sympathetic light. We, the healthy, should take pity on them. Not so in the debut feature Kroko. Sabrina and the others are not charming angels. Completely free of social kitsch and sentimentality, the film is an open invitation to pay a visit to a performance by the Thikwa Ensemble. To say nothing of the fine performances by all the members of the cast. Kroko received a Lola Nomination for Best Feature Film and another for Hinnerk Schönemann as Best Supporting Actor.
Discovered at Hof and critically acclaimed again at the Berlinale in the German Films section, Kroko established the director as one of the rising directorial talents on the German film scene. Born 1965 in Brandenburg, Silke Enders studied Sociology and Social Communications, worked in amateur dance and theatre troupes, and assisted on film and TV productions. After making three short films at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB), where she studied directing, she hit creative paydirt with Kroko (2001), a short film for Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) in the “Boomtown-Berlin” series. The short proved to be such a hit that, two years later, it was developed into the full-length Kroko, a telefeature in coproduction with three German TV stations: SWF Baden-Baden, HR Frankfurt am Main, and RBB Berlin-Potsdam.
– Dorothea Moritz
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