"Zivilcourage" or "Civil Courage" is a German television movie from 2010 that runs the usual 90 minutes and was directed by Dror Zahavi, an Israeli filmmaker, and written by Jürgen Werner and looking of both their bodies of work, this movie here may actually be a contender for career best. This has a lot to do with lead actor Götz George, who is in almost every scene of the film and he is as good as ever certainly elevating the material most of the time. He plays a man who becomes an eye witness of a brutal crime and the rest of the film gets intimidated by the one who did it as well as his older brother, both immigrants from Kosovo. Between the two parties, there is an illiterate young woman, the offender's girlfriend who works for a school project for a week with the old man at his second-hand bookshop. She is the one who shows the greatest character development from all the characters and it's a challenging performance. Most of the time she does well (Genzkow) and when she doesn't, it is more due to the script and not really her not hitting the right notes. The subject, even if the film is almost a decade old, could not be any more current and relevant these days as we have immigrants failing to integrate and instead live in their parallel society that is defined through disrespect and violence towards the people living in their street until eventually complete escalation cannot be ruled out anymore. The fact that he'd get a gun eventually is not that surprising, the only question is if he will use it and I am not gonna spoiler that for you. Makes me sad again that George is dead now, even with the time passed, as films and performances like this one are the evidence of how he really was one of the best we ever had here in Germany. But luckily, he left us a wonderful body of work. This film we got here gets a thumbs-up from me and I certainly recommend checking it out. It is a powerful and true statement of a huge challenge ahead of us and I hope we will master it eventually in more satisfying ways than it is done in the movie here. Watch it.
Review of Civil Courage
