Fat World

A sympathetic portrait of the Munich homeless, from a novel by Helmut Krausser. Taciturn, permanently pissed but basically 'together' Hagen (Vogel, excellent) shares an abandoned urine-filled concrete building with a gallery of drifters, druggies, alkies and the emotionally vulnerable. He finds some kind of redemption through his slowly burgeoning love for a 15-year-old Berlin runaway (Filimonov), despite the intervention of the police. Keeping stylisation to a minimum (he's evidently beguiled by realist absurdity), Schütte charts a confident course between the destructive rocks of indulgent gutter poetry and mawkish care-junkie semi-documentaryism. Softer emotionally, but as intelligent and observant, this encouraging, involving drama comes close to the class of MacKinnon's The Grass Arena.