A 23-year-old carpenter becomes Bavaria's most wanted — and they send 300 cops for one man.
The Robber Mathias Kneißl became a legend in Bavaria. The film is based on the historical criminal case and describes the last year of the rebel and folk hero. At the age of 23, he is released from prison, where he has served an unreasonably harsh six-year sentence. When this becomes known, he loses his job as a carpenter and now wants to emigrate to America with his girlfriend. He hopes to earn the money for the journey by committing crimes. In the process, he fatally wounds a gendarme. Despite this, Mathias Kneißl does not leave the area and stays in the Dachau hinterland. Only when his girlfriend betrays him is he able to find his hiding place. The farm was besieged by 300 police officers for days and then shot up. Kneißl was seriously injured and treated in a clinic in Munich before being beheaded in Augsburg in 1902.
Acting
Stephan Becker's hollow-eyed desperation — you feel the sentence before the guillotine.
Direction
Herbrich traps you in Kneißl's narrowing world until walls feel like coffins.
Cinematography
Mud, blood, and Bavarian grey — no romantic outlaw gloss here.
Director
Oliver Herbrich
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Real Kneißl's execution drew 4,000 spectators; the film used actual Dachau region locations where he hid.
Kneißl became a socialist and anarchist symbol — ironic for a man who just wanted America.
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