I Feel Like Disco

Diving coach Hanno Herbst (Heiko Pinkowski) has no sympathy for his son - because Florian (Frithjof Gawenda) is a big daydreamer, loves pop songs and can't do much with girls. He's happiest when Hanno isn't around and he can dance around the apartment in a disco outfit with his mom (Christina Große). But when one terrible morning there is suddenly no one around to protect the two men from each other, Hanno and Florian have to learn to get along on their own. With the help of pop idol Christian Steiffen and sex therapist Rosa von Praunheim, a new father-son relationship with a disco feel develops between the diving pool and the dance floor. “Axel Ranisch, director of the surprise success ”Dicke Mädchen" from 2011, emphasizes that his new film contains a lot of material from his own biography. The film is a great declaration of love to his youth, his home town of Lichtenberg and his own father. The story of a young man coming out is fairly standard film material. Ranisch - by his own admission the fat and gay child of two competitive athletes - tells his story in an idiosyncratic way and full of abstruse and touching scenes. It is probably thanks to the wild trash elements that it comes across as so fresh. Pop musician Christian Steiffen takes on the role of the quasi-narrator, who brings the Herbst family closer together again with a great deal of understanding, looking like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and speaking like Horst Schimanski. [...] The fact that Ranisch can count Christian Steiffen, a real pop singer, among the cast (he belongs to the genre of so-called neo- or indie pop) is just one of the many hilarious elements of the film." (Anne-Sophie Balzer, on: zeit.de)