Experimental filmmaker Hellmuth Costard and co-director Jürgen Ebert have created a film that begins as a quasi-documentary and turns into computer-science fiction. The title refers to the expression used in computer technology to describe the phenomenon of computer control functioning as fast as the event controlled. In Costard and Ebert's vision, the military, unbeknownst to the public, has measured out the earth with its satellites on a grid so fine that it produces a natural, spatial image of a desired place--an image in which one can move in any direction in real time. As the powers-that-be play with the insane idea that the world can be conceived as a perfectly administered collection of information, a military adventure becomes possible in which the distinction between a real attack and simulated events is unclear.
Enter Georg, an unemployed scientist, who finds himself in unreal space--a timeless system from which there is no escape. He encounters Ruth, whom he had known before his strange, inexplicable transformation, and whose idea it is that they are only simulations of themselves and have, in fact, already been destroyed. Georg and Ruth set out to find the commanding system, and the moment of redemption in real time.
Hellmuth Costard is a technically innovative experimental filmmaker who has worked both in Super-8 and 16mm; several of his films have shown at PFA, and his feature-length Super-8 film, Der Kleine Godard, received the German Film Critics' Prize for the best German film of 1978. Costard and Jürgen Ebert first collaborated in 1980 on Witzleben.