The rivalry between the supporters of football clubs FC Sachsen and Lok Leipzig has traditionally been the strongest in Germany, with hatred and violence reaching unheared-of dimensions. Franziska Tenner, who investigated the inner workings of the neo-Nazis scene in Frankfurt/Oder in her last film, now studies ‘Category C’ supporters – the term used by the police for football hooligans who look for violence and fight frequently, even mostly, outside the football stadium. She chooses an almost ethnographic approach to her subject, regarding it as an archaic male ritual and documenting her observations in a kind of personal report. Her protagonists train for the fight, queue up at the employment office, talk over a beer, go into battle, create ‘choreographies’, get into brutal fights and are arrested just as brutally by the police. The warlike images, some of them from amateur videos, are in apparent contradiction to the statements in which they themselves present the whole thing as a kind of honest sports rivalry with a code of honour and fixed rules: "First we clobber each other, and then we go and have a beer." The film also juxtaposes those statements with questions of what this ‘game’ costs society and what sanctions are necessary. Provocative and important, not just for Leipzig.
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