Based On A True Story

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From interviews and archive material, the film reconstructs a bank robbery that went down in film history, if not in history - through Sidney Lumet's psychodrama HUNDSTAGE , shot in 1975 , in which Al Pacino embodied the desperate and hapless bank robber Sonny Wortzik. Lumet's thriller was based on a true story. The model for his protagonist in real life is John Wojtowicz , On a hot August afternoon in 1972, he stormed into a Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank and, with his gun in his hand, asked for a prompt payment in substantial amounts - to no avail. Because the police unexpectedly quickly stood in front of the bank and block the exit.Wojtowicz takes eight hostages. The planned express robbery turns into a 14-hour nerve war, a spectacle in which the media take part in addition to police officers and passers-by. At the trial, John Wojtowicz will state that the booty was intended to finance his lover's sex change. When he fined his sentence, he returned to Brooklyn and moved to a house a few blocks from where he was robbed. Since then, John Wojtowicz has lived a life in the shadow of a cinematic memory that is not his. Wojtowicz's account has so far been missing from the many eyewitnesses who commented on the course of the 14-hour hostage drama after the fact and on the occasion of her filming. In You can hear Walter Stokman s film for the first time.   

Details

  • Länge

    75 min
  • Land

    Niederlande
  • Vorführungsjahr

    2005
  • Herstellungsjahr

    2004
  • Regie

    Walter Stokman
  • Mitwirkende

    John Wojtowicz, Chris Sarandon, Frank Pierson, Al Pacino, Sidney Lumet, John Cazale
  • Produktionsfirma

    Kasander Film Company
  • Berlinale Sektion

    Panorama
  • Berlinale Kategorie

    Dokumentarfilm

Filmografie Walter Stokman

1997 Can't U Hear Me Singin' | 2002 ASH World Wide Suicide | 2012 Dirty Window