Retired engineer Peter Bittel (Gottfried Richter) prepares for his great performance: a speech to Vladimir Putin about things personal and political, a monologue in Russian around fifteen minutes long. Although Bittel can hold his speech from his home computer, it is supposed to be live and available to everyone online. Bittel practices reading his script, edits and rejects or hones individual passages, and sometimes despairs in the face of the pronunciation and grammar of the language. It is a text like a confession: Peter Bittel is a “Westerner” who has lost his faith. Bittel’s speech oscillates between political forces and challenges us to question our own favorite political standpoints, to discard them or to buttress them.

Written and directed by Sven Johne
actor / narrator: Gottfried Richter
text: Sven Johne with Sergej Gladkich
copyediting: Falk Haberkorn
translation into English: Dawn Michelle d’Atri
camera / lighting: Steve Kfoury
camera assistant / sound: Jörn Ihmels
studio recording: Martin Freitag  
edit / sound mixing: Sven Voß
color grading: Juan Pablo Brockhaus
Commissioned by the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin Sven Johne, 2017