Black Box BRD (2001) is a double portrait of a victim and suspected perpetrator. Director Andres Veiel has an enduring interest in the violence of the Red Army Faction, the left-wing terrorist movement that emerged in West Germany in the 1970s. In this documentary he focuses not on its most sensational attacks, but on its after-shocks, felt long after the deaths of Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. 

In 1989, Alfred Herrhausen, a chairman of Deutsche Bank was killed in a car bomb, for which a later generation of the RAF claimed responsibility. In 1993, during his attempted arrest, prime suspect Wolfgang Grams sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head. Two decades later, both deaths remain only partially explained. In order to understand more, Veiel works, as he often does, with the survivors. He invites them to remember Herrhausen and Grams and allows us to see not only the radical differences between these two men, but also their startling proximity. 

Andres Veiel was born in 1959 in Stuttgart and is one of the most important directors working in Germany today. Black Box BRD is being shown at Summerhall together with two other films by Veiel as part of a project led by Dora Osborne, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and generously supported by the Goethe Institut. There will be a brief introduction to each film.

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