Uwe Friessner's first feature, At the End of the Rainbow, follows the exploits of a West Berlin teenager named Jimmi who ekes out a living through petty theft and part-time hustling, hangs out in punk clubs, and who, for reasons which this film subtly details, is thoroughly unemployable. Drawing on his own experience in trying to help a young runaway who eventually committed suicide, Friessner wrote into Jimmi's story several older students who attempt to find work for him, and who give him shelter for a time in their commune.
“The astonishing thing about this first feature is the assurance and understanding with which Uwe Friessner practises his craft, handling, for instance, the scene of a violent family fight with an unpretentious mastery before which more seasoned filmmakers should humbly bow their heads. What in particular makes this ‘little film' such an important debut is the uncompromising conviction with which Friessner asserts his hero's individuality - in other words, the interrelated elements that make up the microcosm which is his life: his language and its limits, his physicality and his sexuality, the whole ambiguity and uncertainty of his wants and dreams, of what he doesn't articulate and what emerges, indirectly, from what he does articulate - namely, his pride, his yearning for happiness, his need for love.
“To our bourgeois cinema, The End of the Rainbow brings sub-proletarian experiences; without any tub-thumping denunciation or heroification, Friessner, like an ethnographer, offers a detailed description of a world in which reading job advertisements in the papers, making a phone call or applying for a job are adventures and exhausting efforts. And his detailed descriptions provide an initiation into an alien and hermetic reality.” --Wolfram Schütte