“We all get sick here, at times,” says Ebbo Velten in Sleeping Sickness, and it certainly seems that way with him. Velten is a charismatic German doctor who has spent years fighting the titular disease in Cameroon but now, with the epidemic finally under control, he finds himself torn between staying on and returning to his wife and daughter in Germany. The opening scenes show Velten in all his complexity: irascible and arrogant but also passionate and principled, but by the time Alex Nzila –
a young French doctor sent by the WHO to report on the programme – arrives, something has got under his skin. Turning up at Velten’s remote rural hospital, Nzila finds more than a touch of Kurtz about the doctor, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Velten’s strange behaviour.
From the opening scene at a border checkpoint to the climactic night hunt, writer-director Ulrich Köhler explores every kind of post-colonial malaise in a film rife with simmering tension and creeping unease. Pierre Bokma is outstanding as the ambiguous Velten, while Jean-Christophe Folly (seen in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum) is utterly convincing as the callow doctor lost in Velten’s jungle. - Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival
Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland
Winner, Silver Bear, Berlin Film Festival