Wer frueher stirbt ist laenger tot
Last night I watched the DVD of a film called ‘Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot” (He who dies earlier is dead longer). My sister had brought it back for me from Tübingen, knowing that I like to watch German films but find it difficult to get hold of any. This was actually one I had heard of and wanted to see; released in 2007, it has won numerous German film prizes, and I had seen it reviewed on the German news sender Deutsche Welle.
The film tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy called Sebastian, who is growing up in a small village in Bavaria. He is a rather mischievous lad, who always seems to be getting himself into bizarre scrapes, and one day in a fit of exasperation at him, his older brother reproaches him with the fact he killed their mother. Young Sebastian had previously believed that she had died in a car crash; however, the truth is that she died in childbirth.
It is a truth which devastates Sebastian. You may or may not know that Bavaria is one of the most Catholic areas of Europe, and so Sebastian is well equipped with a sense of guilt to deal with the occasion. He starts to have vivid nightmares where he is at the Final Judgement and the court is weighing up his extensive catalogue of sins and discussing how long they are going to send him into the burning fires of Purgatory to make amends.
Terrified by this, Sebastian decides that there is only one answer; he must become immortal. He makes several hilariously unsuccessful attempts to do this before he has a new idea; perhaps he can make everything good again by finding a new wife for his father. It so happens that his (very attractive) father has fallen for his (married) schoolteacher. Sebastian’s superstitious belief in signs, combined with his belief that he is already a murderer, nearly lead to disaster when he obtains a gun with which to take out the teacher’s husband. Happily, this is a comedy, albeit a dark one at times, and it everything comes good in the end.
All in all a thoroughly enjoyable film which I can see myself watching several times over and certainly recommend. A word of caution though; the dialogue of the film is in the local dialect of Bayrisch, something which will be partially incomprehensible even to some German native speakers. Luckily, the DVD comes with helpful subtitles in High German, without which I would certainly have missed all of the jokes. Whether there is a version with English subtitles I am unsure, but there certainly ought to be, because this is a film with an appeal far outside the Bayrisch-speaking community 
Tags: Bavaria, German film, Wer frueher stirbt ist laenger tot