Here, my friends, is the corrected and expanded version of the short film, which was selected from 900 CIS films by Joel Chapron and shown as part of the Cinefondation section at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.
Brief synopsis
Adi is not accepted to school. The reason is that the boy is left-handed. The teacher suggests the father to change his son from left-handed to right-handed over the summer. All would be nothing if the maiden name of the boy's grandmother was not Schicklgruber.....
Unfolded synopsis
All children are angels. But something terrible happens in childhood. And the angel suddenly turns into the devil. Satan himself, faced with such an imp on the street, hurries to cross the road. What causes spoilage? Where is the point of no return? The author tells about the turn in the fate of little Adi Schicklgruber, an Austrian schoolboy, in whose life everything went awry one Sunday morning. That day, his hand, contrary to the voice of his heart and mind, wrote a squiggle in his school notebook — HITLER.
I made a sketch about humiliation and insults, which hurt, but also give fantasy. A child is beaten! For what? And why does God fail to act? Hitler interested me, but least of all psychoanalysis, which viewed the dictator's destructiveness from the angle of the Oedipus complex. I decided to investigate the obstruction of the marginalised, and to put an end to speculation about the nature of evil with the drama of left-handed children. I took up the defence of genes whose breakdowns supposedly lead to hard-heartedness. My film didn't absolve the maniac of guilt, but it didn't allow liberals to flash their heels either. Besides, I shunned the beaten track and the autobahn of Fritz Dietz, the paving stones of Kukryniksy preferred the narrow gauge railway with rumbling express trains, the wheels of which would make silverware dance in Clara Hitler's kitchen cupboard. There was also the Chaplin way. But I dismissed it, seeing laughter as a bearish favour to the tyrant.
What if we don't stigmatise evil, but listen? What if the devil is laid on the couch - isn't that what Freud, Jung, Adler and Karen Horney did? Wouldn't Lucifer, having blown off steam, lay his cards on the table?
The painting was expected. But the appearance of the ogoltsy surprised even the hardened critics. The idea that monsters have childhoods too, it was shocking. Of course, happy growing up with slightly burnt cakes, a papier-mâché paradise, a mahogany crucifix and Shrovetide festivities in colourful carnival costumes will not make the viewer cry. But the more convincingly Addy suffered from the leather crag with which the customs officer Alois strapped his left arm to his son's thigh, the more difficult it was for the audience to demonise Hitler. The villain was being humanised! The attack only sharpened its claws ...
At the beginning of the film, clutching a pencil in his left hand, the first-grader writes "Adolf Schicklgruber" in Sütterlin script (German Gothic italics), but in the final scene, with the fingers of his plastered right hand, he writes "Adolf Hitler". Before that, Addy had blown his father's office to smithereens and fallen on the rubble, in which the future ruins of cities were vaguely guessed. Father a tyrant, mother a slave, teacher a sociopath - what a breeding ground for the birth of a monster.
The heart-touching theme of native ashes, of a homeland forever lost but no less desirable, is embodied in the film by the leitmotif ‘Va, pensiero’ - the chorus of captive Jews from the third act of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Nabucco (1842).