Otomo

1999
Dir: Frieder Schlaich
85 min, 35mm
with Isaach De Bankolé, Eva Mattes, Hanno Friedrich

Based on a true story, Otomo is “a bleak and powerful work” (Elvis Mitchell, New York Times) about the perpetually disenfranchised refugee experience. Isaach De Bankolé, in a critically lauded role, plays Otomo, a West African asylum seeker who becomes the target of a dragnet in Stuttgart, Germany, after an altercation with a train worker. During his flight from the law, Otomo meets strangers willing to help him, but his efforts to escape the police become increasingly extreme. A “shocking portrayal of rampant racism” (Deborah Young, Variety), Otomo is a complex portrait of a man trapped by a society grappling with immigration.