Nothing is better than nothing

When he accompanies his girlfriend to the airport and she flies away along with his wallet, Jan Peters has to come up with something to survive the next few weeks. An encounter on the Frankfurt S-Bahn gives the documentary filmmaker an idea, which he now presents in "Nothing is better than nothing at all".

Equipped with a group ticket, Peters offers to let other travellers ride on his card for a small fee. Right at the beginning of this experiment, he meets a business consultant who provides him with good ideas for his fledgling "enterprise". But Peters also keeps finding new ideas on how to make his way through life on his own from the other people he meets on his trips through Frankfurt, such as Jürgen Schank, a street vendor in the entrance hall of the Südbahnhof, or the childminder Susanne Wiest. Peters dives deeper and deeper into a world of obscure side jobs and adventurous business models that give him a whole new perspective on our society.

"Nothing is better than nothing at all" is an entertaining documentary that, on the one hand, tells a story about people on the margins of our society without coming across as too depressing or doctrinaire. Rather, Peters also succeeds in exhilarating his viewers and entertaining them well. But the film also functions as a somewhat different portrait of the Main metropolis and introduces viewers from the region to the city from a somewhat different perspective. Few people know that delicious honey is produced both on the banks of the Main and on the roof of the MMK. Or how hotly contested the station at the stadium is when it comes to collecting returnable bottles.

Don't give up hope, believe in your own ideas and just show a little humanity now and then - this and more is conveyed by the staged documentary "Nothing is better than nothing" sometimes moving, sometimes with a satirical wink and for long stretches very entertaining. Worth seeing

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp