Gesine Schmidt, Andres Veiel

Summer 2002, the brothers Marco (23) and Marcel (17) and their friend Sebastian (17) attack the 16-year-old Marinus, who belongs to the hip-hop scene. The shaven-headed attackers beat their weaker victim for hours on end.
There are adult witnesses who fail to intervene. The victim and his tormentors know each other, they all come from the same village in the Uckermark. Marinus is killed by Marcel jumping on the back of his victim’s head. The "Potzlow murder" was pigeonholed by public opinion as an ideologically motivated crime committed by right-wing extremists.
However, the violence of the crime does not begin in this night. Nor with the disintegration of the region’s villages after German reunification. On closer inspection, it is found as a constant in the life histories of those involved, their parents and grandparents: in the treatment of Polish slave labourers in 1942, in the treatment of the "new" foreigners during the 1990s. Both the family of the murderers and that of the victim are "outsiders" who have never really found a place in the village community.
By assembling a montage of condensed transcripts of interviews with the brothers, their parents, the victim’s friends, the public prosecutors and the village community, "Der Kick" seeks to illuminate the biographical background to the crime.