Combat Girls

Democracy has made everyone equal, and this is a real problem: they hate foreigners, Jews, policemen, homosexuals, all those who are considered guilty of the nation's fate. Marina, 20, is one of them, a real fighter. She assists her grandfather in the hospital, a man who has a history of great violence especially with the girl's mother. She works in a supermarket as a cashier and has a supernazi ultra-tattooed boyfriend, whom she says is 100 percent German.

They do not hesitate to assault strangers, terrorize passersby, and have explicit sex as soon as they have reached the right excitement caused by violence. They are part of a neo-Nazi gang and one day, after an unfortunate encounter with two Afghans, Marisa takes her car and runs them over, convinced that she has killed them.

A few days later she meets one of the two and a guilt mechanism is triggered in her. She will, therefore, secretly begin to help him as she continues with her raids and encounters that foment indoctrination.

Meanwhile, a 15-year-old girl, Svenja, in conflict with her family begins to join the group. Marisa, will represent for her a role model to imitate, while some happenings will arouse in the experienced fighter the possibility of gaining awareness of the absurdities of that ideology especially with respect to the female role. The outcomes will be, to say the least, surprising.

This film is director David Wnendt's dissertation for the University of Film and Television in Postdam-Babelsberg (Germany), who says he did a long time working on the subject and found it difficult to get in touch with the neo-Nazis; only after extensive research through websites did he manage to get direct testimonies. He tells that he wanted to represent the story through a female gaze because neo-Nazi women, who are very active, actually experience a strong contradiction. On the one hand they approach these groups to get away from their families, behaving like men, but in reality the neo-Nazis continue to see women at best as ornaments at their meetings or relegated to the home and confined to having children.

A film with great pace, explicit and strong. At times naive and didactic but definitely interesting especially for the younger generation.