Sophisticated Acquaintance

Mixing elements of narrative experimental pseudo-documentary and essayist cinema Sophisticated Acquaintance tells the story of a tormented individual whose short life and long death were affected by a great many factors. Klaus Mann (John Gross) a present-day Philadelphia avatar of the real-life European author of Mephisto lives in the shadow of his father the eminent intellectual novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann (Ernst Hohmann). When Klaus pens a controversial essay on "revolutionary suicide" and then acts on it in protest of the world's selfishness a group of his contemporaries speak up in filmed interviews about what led him down that path. It is a film about the creative process the tragic depiction of a strained father-son relationship and most of all it is a film about individuality.