›Tagfish‹ (TAG=Tight-Aggressive) is a poker player who is technically brilliant but plays too fearfully and so is easy prey for those happier to take a risk.
The Antwerp-based group BERLIN are famous for their astute video portraits of cities, and in ›Tagfish‹ they shine a light for the first time on the Ruhr District. The premise behind their docu-fiction, which had its world premiere at Theater der Welt, is as follows: a sheikh from the Middle East wants to build a luxury hotel complex at Zollverein – a huge vision for the Ruhr District or an impossible endeavour on the grounds of a World Cultural Heritage site? For several weeks BERLIN interviewed protagonists from the city of Essen and its cultural landscape, from the heads of civic building departments to journalists, and created a fictitious meeting based on the documentary material gathered. In a theatrically-staged film montage, the interviewees sit around a conference table and debate, argue and philosophise about feasibility and costing millions, about utopias and visions, stagnation and impending change.