From The Edinburgh Festival 2006 Introduction

“…But not only is this the 60^th event, it is the 2006 Festival with its own new, hand picked bunch of movies. The World Cup might be over, but Germany continues to sizzle. Berlin is pretty much the hottest capital in Europe right now, once more a haven for artists, musicians and dreamers – and judging from their films, something is definitely stirring in the Deutsche Filmindustrie. Hence a special spotlight: Das Neue Wave!  ...the scatological comedy of BLACK SHEEP – that will both challenge and expand our understanding of our friends across the Rhine.”  

"Rihs' second feature is a no-holds-barred assault on good taste and bourgeois convention: from its opening scenes, a chaotic scam in a posh restaurant (and the no-holds-barred hotel-room bonkfest that follows) to its trio of horny Turkish teens, looking to get laid at any cost – and not forgetting the disgruntled tour guide, loudly taunting her patrons while cruising along Berlin’s river Spree – this episodic film gives a vivid sense of Berlin today: the sex-clubs, the Kreuzberg squats, the, er, amputations….. Shot in grainy monochrome, flecked here and there with odd, brilliant touches of colour (that credit sequence alone is worth the price of admission) it’s a hardcore treat for the young and unshockable. Tough admittedly, even the latter might look askance at the scene between the Satanists and their comatose granny…..

How refreshing, after so much worthy endeavour, to find a film that wants to improve us not at all. That cares not a bit for educating us, or transforming us, or illuminating some hitherto unacknowledged facet of our contemporary lives. That, on the contrary, seeks only to entertain – and then, by the very crudest and most direct of means. A gleeful cavalcade of bad taste, Oliver Rihs’s feature is a provocation only to those prepared to be offended by it; for the rest of us, it’s a funny, rough-hewn and mostly effective comedy, extreme enough to nudge the boundaries of good taste while at the same time tinged with a real affection for the gallery of misfits, hustlers and dreamers it depicts.

Though its makers are mostly Swiss (writer-director Oliver Rihs made his debut with Blackberries back in 2002), this film’s subject, and its great overriding passion, is Berlin – a city currently unique in Europe, being at once the nation’s capital and one of its most impoverished major centres.

Through five unrelated stories, all occurring more or less simultaneously, we glimpse something of the state of the city and its inhabitants post-reunification: its uneasy synthesis of commerce and privation, its ingenuity and enterprise.

One could, if one were so inclined, detect a political allegory here: tour guide Charlotte’s verbal assault on her former classmate, now a bourgeois "Wessie" (West German) housewife, has the familiar plaint of former East Berliners against their more affluent cousins on the other side of the Wall. And one might, at a stretch, discern in the travails of Ali and his two comrades - perhaps the most desperate-to-get-laid teenagers since Lemon Popsicle – some anguished plea on the life of Turkish immigrants, the sons and daughters of the Gastarbeitern; or in Julian’s callow activism, the political and spiritual malaise of the post-Baader-Meinhof generation.

But this would be mere sophistry: a film critic’s desperate attempt to overlay a template of meaning upon something that is at heart, and by design, critic-proof. You either accept Black Sheep as it is, or not. Fact is, it’s fun, and genuinely iconoclastic: as close as anything has come, in recent years, to a genuinely Punk cinema.

Finally, a word about the credit sequence: undoubtedly the most beautiful of the year and as such, a landmark in a rapidly vanishing art.

Shot in high-contrast B&W, featuring accelerated footage of various visual landmarks (from railway station platforms to the telecommunications tower at Alexanderplatz), and scored to a superb, driving slice of funk, it communicates at least as strongly as the film, which follows it in the hectic, can-do nature of life in the metropolis.