In the documentary “The Attack,” relatives of the Breitscheidplatz terror victims have their say

A minute in which Astrid Passin, daughter of one of the 13 victims of the Islamist attacker Anis Amri, leafs through the family album. She looks at black and white photos of her young father driving her around in a stroller.

She flips the parchment paper between the pages with a crackling sound, her chin resting on her hand. Her eyes fill with tears. A helpless wave of hands and the film crew understands that they can’t continue talking.

She is one of the most important protagonists in Astrid Schult’s impressive documentary series “The Attack”. Like many other relatives of the victims, she doesn’t know what happened to her father for a long time. He and her mother only went to the Christmas market that evening because they couldn’t get any more theater tickets. She remembers exactly the moment when a phone call made it certain that her father was dead: “It was a stab in the heart.”

December 19, 2016. One of those days when people in Berlin still know where they were and what they were doing when the news of the attack on the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz became public.

The images of the destroyed wooden stalls and fairy lights go around the world, as do those of the truck that the Tunisian Anis Amri drove into the Budengasse on Budapester Strasse. He had previously murdered the Polish truck driver Lukasz Urban in order to get his truck. He is the symbol of terrorist violence that does not stop at harmless Christmas joys.

Seeing these news images from the film “The Attack” again makes you uneasy. Especially in the chapel of the Memorial Church, just a few meters away from the memorial for the 13 attack victims, where the film has its public premiere. Also because there are relatives of the dead who are the focus of the documentary with their pain and their questions, some of which have not yet been answered.

Petr Cizmar lost his wife in the attack

One of them is Astrid Passin, who is leafing through the photo album at the beginning of the first episode. She reacted actively to the paralysis of shock and grief that the loss of her father plunged her into. Her association “Victims of Terrorism Germany” takes care of networking and supporting those affected and their relatives.

Petr Cizmar, who lost his wife in the attack, also decided to speak on camera about the disregard he received from the authorities. “If we remain silent, no one will know how an attack like this changes lives,” he says.

Director Schult has been researching the attack since 2017 and, among other things, visited the Bundestag investigative committee. This was supposed to work through the investigative chaos surrounding the attack. Schult cites shame as a motivation for giving the relatives a voice in her film.

Shame about the behavior of German authorities and politicians who treated the mourners without empathy. “I found it strange that the relatives of the terror victims were so little visible in Germany,” she says. This is completely different in countries like Italy and France.

This is also clear in the film. In which the funeral of Fabrizia di Lorenzo can be seen, which is accompanied by great public sympathy in her native Italy. Fabrizia was 31 years old when she was fatally injured on Breitscheidplatz. “A wonderful, open girl,” as her mother Giovanna di Lorenzo says. Even nine years after her death, the loss is written all over her face.

Documentation consists of five chapters

Despite these moving interviews, “The Attack” is anything but a film of pure concern. The events before, during and after the crime are reconstructed too closely and the background of Anis Amri’s Islamist network is explained too well.

The second level of the story, which is divided into five chapters “Presences”, “Act”, “Trauma”, “State” and “Consequences”, consists of interviews with investigators, investigative journalists, terrorism experts, a member of the investigative committee, a victim advocate and a trauma therapist.

Tightly reconstructed events

Schult uses news material from back then and city views from today for her web of images and voices. The fact that the black truck keeps driving around until the moment of the crime – accompanied by dramatic music – exaggerates the true crime atmosphere. However, the vehicle that later becomes the weapon of the attack creates a threat scenario that is in stark contrast to the peaceful Christmas market scene before the attack.

The monstrosity of terrorist violence, which struck concertgoers at the Bataclan in Paris and passers-by in the subway in Brussels before the attack in Berlin in 2016, resonates in this contrast. And also tells about the many other attacks on peaceful everyday places.

When it comes to the failure of the authorities and intelligence services, whose focus was on Anis Amri as one of 450 menaces in Germany long before the crime, the film leaves a disturbing feeling. Especially with a view to future Islamist attacks. The interview with BKA Vice President Sven Kurenbach, who defends his investigators’ lone perpetrator hypothesis, further increases the unease.