Everything will be fine

After his acclaimed documentary Nobody`s Perfect, contergan-damaged director Niko von Glasow returns with a new project in which he once again attempts to tear down the walls between the non-disabled and the disabled in a way that is both moving and amusing. All will be well documented the casting and rehearsals for a play in which von Glasow puts 14 amateurs and professionals on one stage to tell the story of people with special needs who want to perform in a casting show. The play itself is adapted to the lives, fears and aspirations of the performers during the rehearsal process. They reveal these in group discussions or in one-on-one conversations with the director.

The result is a teaching piece for tolerance that fortunately does not come across as too doctrinaire. Rather, von Glasow stays true to the style of Nobody`s Perfect and mixes his highly human view of his protagonists with a lot of humor, self-irony, but also with very emotional moments. In the process, it becomes clear time and again that a physical handicap does not necessarily mean a handicapped mind - and vice versa. Self-doubt, arrogance, insecurity, unfulfilled longings - these are all characteristics that both disabled and non-disabled people can feel. And so the boundaries between disabled and non-disabled participants in the theatre project quickly become blurred in the film, which is the very special charm of the film.

Nearly 680 hours of footage were recorded by von Glasow and his team during the casting and rehearsals. They then edited together a very entertaining cross-section of a whole kaleidoscope of feelings that burst out of the participants during such a project. Sometimes it's emotionally very intense, sometimes it's just funny or heartfelt, but sometimes it's not always very likeable. But no matter whether the participants reveal their emotional strengths or weaknesses, they always prove to be absolutely human. And with that, the goal of the film would be achieved: to show in an entertaining way how important it is for every human being to recognize and accept his own handicap and to realize that terms like normal or handicapped can not necessarily be defined only by obvious characteristics.

Although Everything will be fine is not quite as entertaining and effective as Nobody`s Perfect, Niko von Glasow shows again very well how messages like tolerance can be conveyed in an entertaining and worth seeing way. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp