Stuttgart 21 - Denk mal!

Stuttgart 21 – Think to Remember!

"Did you go to the demo on Monday?" - The citizens of Stuttgart are on the ball, inquisitive, open and creative – because they are busy making their voices heard.

The old and the young, managers and artists, housewives and businesspeople – they are all coming together on the streets in order to make use of their civil rights; they all want to have a say when it comes to politics, and nobody is prepared to be made a fool of.

The protagonists of this grass roots initiative against the controversial Stuttgart 21 transport project describe the goings-on and their reasons for protesting with the same emotion, intuition and partiality that informs the movement itself. These are people you wouldn’t normally expect to find taking part in a demonstration, and yet they are the very ones who make this protest story worth telling.

This is because it’s not just about a new railway station; it’s about the personalities of the demonstrators. This film describes what happened in Stuttgart, where a movement was born that was completely new for this Swabian city and has since become one of the largest citizen-led actions in Germany in a very long time. Change is in the air, there is a new consciousness about, one that goes beyond the Stuttgart 21 project and is now challenging a whole swathe of other social structures in the country. The citizens are busy redefining their positions. A new heart is beating.

Source: 61. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)