DER KANDIDAT

Der Kandidat (The Candidate) competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival. It's another film collage – that puts together clips from newsreels, archives, and television to review - motivated by the election campaign for the German Bundestag in 1981, where Franz Josef Strauss sought the office of the chancellor. Strauss founded the Christian Socialist Union and had a long political history as a parliamentarian (1949), Special Minister (1952), and by 1955 was Minister of Defence. His career began to unravel when a series of scandals hit the presses that involved him in kickbacks and abuses of power. Strauss was forced to resign his post as Defence Minister in the early 1960s when yet another scandal broke about his dictatorial handling of criticism on his military policies. This documentary provides a clear history of Strauss' actions and how they were received in the media at the time.

This work has been digitised in the frame of DCA Project