Cannibals Come to the Silver Screen

To be called 'Your Heart for My Brain', the movie will be based on the all too real case of the nation's most notorious maneater.

Filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim is determined to make the film, no matter how high he has to leap to be able to do so. His subject matter already has Germany's conservatives, who find the whole thing too tasteless for words, choking. It's the kind of publicity which will secure the project all the more attention, not, however, that he will need to do much to nurture the nation's interest.

However abhorrent and thankfully incomprehensible cannibalism is to the world at large, it remains a source of morbid fascination. Von Praunheim has been working on the subject for more than twenty years and has already written several scripts. Now he has been granted €20,000 ($24,000) in development money from the North Rhine-Westphalia film foundation for the project, which is going to be a mixture of thriller, grotesque and documentation.

The background to the film is the case of the cannibal Armin Meiws, who was sentenced to 8 and a half years imprisonment for manslaughter after he was found guilty of killing and then eating parts of the engineer Bernd Jürgen B.

Von Praunhein has long been considered a controversial filmmaker who is not afraid of tackling tough topics, which probably makes him the perfect man for this somewhat unsavoury job.