THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

LIEBER THOMAS

Title: Lieber Thomas
English translation of title: Dear Thomas
Year of release: 2021
Director: Andreas Kleinert
Screenwriter: Thomas Wendrich
Country of Production: Germany
Genre: Biopic
Length: 2 hours 30 minutes
Language: German
Availability: A blu-ray is available. At time of writing, opensubtitles.org has subtitles in German but not in English. English subtitles have, however, been made for the first 8 minutes of the film, which is the part featuring the actor Claudio Magno (contact Editor for these subtitles).
Principal boy: Claudio Magno (above, and screenshots below) plays 11-year-old Thomas Brasch (Magno himself was around 13 years old at time of filming).

Synopsis
A stylish biopic of the German writer, playwright, screenwriter, director and poet, Thomas Brasch. The film is divided into seven sections and a prelude. The section of the film that is on-topic for this Archive is the prelude, in which Claudio Magno plays young Thomas, who is sent to Cadet School in the GDR in 1956. During his time there he experiences rejection by his fellow cadets for not pulling his weight in team activities, witnesses an ostracised comrade causing himself extreme self-harm by chewing on shards of broken glass, and decides to become a writer. The prelude ends in a dream sequence in which Thomas imagines himself as the eponymous hero of the 1942 Danish children's story Palle alene i verden (Palle alone in the world), who wakes up to find that everyone else has vanished, and has various adventures, including flying an airplane to the moon. (The book was later made into a 1949 Danish film.)

(Note for those viewing the film who might not be familiar with German culture: The song the father and son sing in the car in the opening sequence is called "Jetzt fahr’n wir übern See", and it's a sort of game, where you are supposed to omit the last word of a repeated line. See the entry for this song in the German Wikipedia for an explanation of the rules.)

Screenshots