Hamburg Serial Killer Fritz Honka Gets Brutal Film Treatment
Director Fatih Akin's unflinching 2019 drama about Fritz Honka shocked audiences with its relentless realism and won three German Film Awards.
Quick Facts
A film that pushes the boundaries of what we can endure
German filmmaker Fatih Akin brought one of Germany's worst serial murder cases to the big screen when "Der Goldene Handschuh" premiered at the Venice Film Festival on October 23, 2019. The film was released in Germany a day later and met with immediate massive resistance and debate.
Based on Heinz Strunk's 2016 novel, Akin tells the story of Fritz Honka, who between 1971 and 1974 murdered at least four women in his tiny apartment at Zeißstraße 74 in St. Pauli. Akin chose an unsparing approach: no beautification, no artistic distance, no emotional buffer.
"I did not want to beautify, but to show hell as it was," Akin explained at the Venice press conference. The result was a film that pushed even the most hardened film critics to their limits.
Jonas Dassler becomes the Hamburg serial killer
The heart of the film is Jonas Dassler's transformation into the alcoholic murderer. Makeup artists Maike Heinlein and Lisa Edelmann spent many hours daily applying prosthetic materials, skin coloring, and special contact lenses to transform Dassler into the small, damaged man with a deformed skull that Honka was. The result was so brutally realistic that journalists called the makeup "disturbingly authentic."
