Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame

In the organizer's words:

Attention analog fans and film nostalgics: For once, this is the opportunity to get to know our "Archive Matinée" series, which is otherwise reserved for members only: every two months, we organize free film matinées with breakfast and film discussions, where film treasures from our extensive film archive are screened using our analog film projectors. Cinema from the past as it used to be. To get you in the mood, there will be a breakfast offer with croissant + hot drink for €2.50 in the foyer from 10 a.m., and the introduction will start at 11 a.m.

Bremen 1968: the sixth form of a grammar school rebel against the authoritarian structures in their school. At the center of the revolt is the student Rull, who rejects all order and administration. He provokes his environment with ever new ideas and actions and makes teachers, classmates and police alike look ridiculous. Rull is so absorbed in his role as a provocateur that he not only sabotages the conformist establishment, but also the organization of the protest itself. When he is expelled from school for smearing swastikas and his classmates want to show solidarity with him, he deprives them of any opportunity to resist by accepting the punishment without protest.

THE Bremen film. Cinema as a playground for social utopias. Peter Zadek uses the school microcosm as an experimental set-up for the 1968 utopia of a classless and domination-free society. And his film is also a document of Bremen at the end of the 1960s: car traffic was allowed in Sögestraße, the streets in the city were not parked up, the school-leaving examination was written in a suit, etc.

The Kommunalkino Bremen e.V. owns the only two 35 mm copies of the film. In 1995, we took advantage of the financial opportunities on the occasion of the UNESCO year "100 Years of Cinema" to acquire them. "I am an Elephant, Madame" was digitized in 2019 as part of the "Film Heritage Funding Program" by the German Film Institute & Film Museum.