Film Screening: Punching the World (Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen)

Experience Constanze Klaue's powerful 2025 feature debut, Punching the World (Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen), hosted by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco. About the Film Around the turn of the millennium, deep in the East German provinces, brothers Philipp (age 12) and Tobias (9) spend their youth. Their childhood is marked by the collapse of their own family and the lack of prospects in an entire region. Punching the World  is the powerful feature film debut by director Constanze Klaue. An outstanding ensemble shows how the upheavals of the post-reunification era reverberate for the young protagonists, as well as for their parents' generation, in all their harshness. With sensitivity, Klaue finds a language from within her characters to give voice to the anger and alienation of those for whom the grand promises of the future fell short. She meets her characters on equal footing and paints an unvarnished, richly detailed generational portrait in an environment marked by a lack of prospects and radicalization — an environment representative of countless places around the world. The film is loosely based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Görlitz-based author Lukas Rietzschel, celebrated by Der Spiegel as the "book of the hour".