RAGING BOLL
Canada, Germany, Spain, USA; 2009; digital, 85 min
Directed by: Dan Lee West
Genre: documentary

English language

Wednesday, 28.7.  21:00h  OPEN AIR CINEMA Main Square

Dan Lee West filmed this dynamic and insightful documentary over three years on and off the set.
He won best student director and best film at the 2003 Leo Awards for his first short film Alarium. He was also among the producers of James Gunn’s horror comedy Slither.

German director, writer and producer Uwe Boll is without a doubt one of the most controversial, and at the same time most determined and prolific film makers in today's industry. In spite of critical panning, on-line petitions demanding his retirement and the change in the German film legislation in the year 2005 after which he was forced to seek new ways of funding, he tirelessly gave us title after title and cooperated with a number of famous stars. Apart from horror, comedy, science fiction and adventure he also shot drama, war and biographic movies. With his resourcefulness, persistence, productivity and the proud use of self-promoting provocations from the finest B-movie school of advertising - amongst which the lead is taken by his boxing matches with his most merciless critics - he joined the ranks of today’s most important and interesting independent film makers.

After his early films, shot in his childhood with Super 8 camera, and studies  which gave him a PhD in Literature, he started to shoot films on video. He wrote a book about the shooting of the first two entitled How to Make Films in Germany (Wie Man in Deutschland Filme drehen muss, 1992). A horror Amoklauf and a comedy The First Semester followed. After the TV film Sanctimony, shot in Canada with Casper van Dien, Michael Paré and Eric Roberts, Boll made two more films in the USA: the thriller Blackwoods with Patrick Muldoon and Will Sanders as well as the drama Heart of America with Jurgen Prochnow and Clint Howard.

The year 2003 was marked with the fatal horror House of the Dead, shot after the successful Sega's series of zombie shoot 'em up games. Despite the destructive criticism it raised and failure in the cinemas, it spawned a number of his video games adaptations, only interrupted twice, with a nihilistic horror Seed (2007) and the Vietnam War action drama Tunnel Rats, (2008). Due to the specifics of German film legislation, which enabled the shrewd Boll solid financial budgets, there were many big names in his movies, for example Christian  Slater, Tara Reid and Stephen Dorff in the dark adventure Alone in the Dark (2005), Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Udo Kier, Geraldine Chaplin, Meat Loaf and Michelle Rodriguez in the vampire action Bloodrayne shot in the same year and followed by Bloodrayne 2: Deliverance two years later, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds, John Rhys-Davies and Ron Perlman in the action fantasy In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007), Zack Ward, Dave Foley and Seymour Cassel in the grotesque comedy Postal and Til Schweiger and Ralf Möller in the action movie Far Cry.

All the movies caused severe reactions from fans of video games and constant negative criticism. To all this Boll responded with a burst of fierce and provoking statements and in 2005 he publicly called the critics to a boxing match. The duels really happened in September, the first one in Malaga, Spain and the other four all at once in Vancouver. Being himself an amateur boxer the energetic director won all of the matches. He won an even more important victory after he lost his main source of funding. With the help of the income from the distribution of his and many other movies in the world market through the company Boll KG he successfully stepped into the new era of his film making career.
In 2009 he made three movies: dark prisoner drama Stoic with Edward Furlong, furious thriller Rampage with Brandon Fletcher and war drama Darfur with Billy Zane. This year he finished two features, supernatural thriller Final Storm and boxer biopic Max Schmelling shot in Zagreb in co-production with Jadran film, while the third Bloodrayne film and the terrorist thriller Blackout: The Movie are currently in the postproduction process. During all this time he also produced many films, amongst them the sequel to Alone in the Dark.
At this years festival you will have the opportunity to see some of his new movies, and to top this up Uwe Boll will let you in on his past and future projects, live and in colour!