Gansel’s wave sweeps over Sundance
by Miriam Tola
In April of 1967, Ron Jones, a history teacher at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, conducted a unique experiment. In one week he successfully imposed himself as a charismatic figure and transformed his students into a cohesive body with a strong sense of identity and discipline, a strict code of conduct, a hierarchy and rigorous rules of admission. The name of the group was The Third Wave.
On the last day, the professor called all the participants together under the pretense that they would witness the movement's televised launch on the national level. Instead, Jones explained to them that The Third Wave was a demonstration of the birth of fascism and that the students, like the Germans in the 1930s, had complied with the totalitarian model.
The experiment inspired The Wave [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the film by German director Dennis Gansel in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Based on the eponymous novel by Morton Rhue, the filmmaker set the events in contemporary Germany and cast Juergen Vogel as the teacher, a former anarchist who shows up in class wearing Clash t-shirts and has an open aversion to George W. Bush.
In Park City, Celluloid Dreams has closed the first foreign sales deals with Alliance Films (Canada), Momentum Pictures (UK) and Aurum (Spain).
The film’s domestic release is set for March 13 through Constantin Film.
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