Follow Me was entered as the official German contribution into the competition of the 16th Moscow International Film Festival[1] in 1989 and had its world premiere there.
He says goodbye to his mother, who still thinks he has not grown up, and to his wife and son who he has already left long ago, And he wishes his ex-colleague and arch-enemy well, knowing that he will not forget him.
There, he encounters all kinds of different and extravagant people, who all seem just as stranded as he himself: an Austrian violin fanatic, a German-Jewish lady and the melancholic and wise Russian Ljubja, who owns a brothel and employs girls from all over the world.
Instead he meets a young Russian Red Army Soldier with whom he spends the whole night drinking Vodka and discussing – since neither of them speaks the language of the opposite, they communicate with hands and feet.
The impetus to this project had been her encounter with the Czech actor Pavel Landovský who, having been one of the initiators of the petition Charter 77, had been expelled from his home country.
He told Knilli about how he once travelled to a shooting from Vienna to Helsinki and was the only passenger who had to stay seated in the plane during its stopover in Prague.
[2] Knilli began writing the screenplay in the summer of 1985 and worked on it for over two years, together with the DEFA-filmmaker Ulrich Weiß, whose co-authorship had long been concealed for political reasons by the alias Vera Has.
Throughout his career, Weiß had been closely studying the developments in Czechoslovakian cinema, particularly the work of Jan Nemec and his film A Report on the Party and Guests.
The lead actor Pavel Landovský had been a member of the Wiener Burgtheater and starred in many cinema and television films following his emigration to Austria.
While shooting this film in Helsinki, Knilli also got to know the French actress of Russian descent Marina Vlady who starred together with Landovský and the Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski.
Externally unusual perspectives, views, tours d'horizon, rise up, reality is suspended in favour of the supernatural.