thumb | right | Actor Jens Veith during a sound recording session for the film Oi! Warning
Oi! Warning is a 1999 German movie about a 17-year-old boy who runs away from home to become an Oi! skinhead.
The movie was the directorial debut of twin brothers Benjamin and Dominik Reding. It took them about five years to film, mostly due to financial constraints. It was shot in stark black-and-white, underscoring the film's gritty feel. Among other recognition, the film has won the German Camera Award, and a L.A. Outfest emerging talent award.
Plot summary
Janosch has problems at school and despises the lifestyle of his bourgeois mother. He runs away from home, to his friend Koma, who he had met at a holiday camp. Koma is an Oi! skinhead (also known as a punk-skinhead). He is a particular sort of skinhead who has little political motivations, preferring a lifestyle of partying and binge drinking, and whose musical tastes are a synthesis of skinhead and punk rock music.
Koma's girlfriend is pregnant, and wants him to change his ways. She blows up his secret hideaway with dynamite, but this only infuriates Koma, who blames this on the punks he had gotten into a fight with previously.
Meanwhile, Janosch meets Zottel, a punk who earns a living with small circus acts at wealthy people's parties. The two fall in love, but their happiness is cut short when Koma attacks Zottel and kills him. In a fit of fury, Janosch grabs a brick and slays Koma.
Cast list
- Sascha Backhaus as Janosch. Backhaus portrays the main protagonist Janosch, who escapes his pampered bourgeois lifestyle to become an Oi-skinhead, but later questions the ultra-masculine, testosterone-fueled subculture. Backhaus himself was a real-life squatter.
- Sascha Goerts as Koma. Goerts plays the tough Koma, a hard drinking, kickboxing and often violent Oi-skinhead, who takes Janosch under his wing. Like Backhaus, Goerts was a squatter, and also an occasional street musician. According to them, they then drew a 600-picture storyboard and started choosing actors.
In the film, there is a concert in which the fictional Oi-group Roimkommando (the real life punk band Smegma) holds a concert, to which Oi-skins led by Koma (Goerts) violently mosh to. On the DVD commentary track, the Redings explain that they could not use the sexually charged word Smegma in a film which was meant to be seen by teenagers, so they had to change the name of the band.
- Out-Filmfest, Los Angeles: Outstanding Emerging Talent-Award of the Directors Guild of America 1999
- World Filmfestival, Montréal: Air Canada People Award 1999
- International Filmfestival, Leeds: Audience-Award 1999
- Max Ophüls Filmfestival, Saarbrücken: Film-Award of the Governour of the Saarland 1999
- Film Kunst Fest, Schwerin: NDR Young Talent Award 1999
- International Festival du premiere Film, Annonay (France ): Prix Spécial du Jury 2000