Freakstars 3000

Singing, dancing, air guitar - two dozen participants with disabilities are chased through a casting competition under the eyes of a merciless jury. As a swan song to TV formats such as "Popstars", director Schlingensief organizes a competition with the participation of residents of the Tiele-Winckler Home in Berlin, whose winners are allowed to form the pop band "Freakstar 3000". "Freakstars 3000" is a film for a supposedly "normal" society that labels supposedly strange contemporaries as disabled and outsources them so as not to spoil the sky-blue TV tristesse. In this gallant satire on the lowlands of German television entertainment, the Freakstars hold up a revealing mirror to the ratings regulators and the audience, with Schlingensief using the protagonists' joy of playing without denouncing their disabilities. "The freak is the situation itself, which forces us to differentiate between what is normal and what is not," Schlingensief recently said in an interview with the "taz" newspaper. It is his specialty to use the media to create an exaggerated counter-model ("System II") and thus, because it is not so far removed from the initial situation, to point out the absurdity of the prevailing order. [...] The motto of "Freakstars 3000" is "We are healthy and you are sick". The feature film for the series, which is not so far removed from the usual television program, was received with great acclaim at its premiere at the Volksbühne, where the Freakstars have already performed live and where Schlingensief's avant-garde art terror action "Atta Atta" can currently be seen. They are all disabled, if only by the roaring laughter of the person in the back row." (Johanna Straub, on: spiegel.de)