The Minus Man

Fiction feature | Director & screenplay: Paul Poet

He is a killer. Pimp. Thief and whore-trainer. Filled with hate, an addict, and aggressive towards himself, others and everything around him. Heinz Sobota, born in 1944, is a child of the post-war gloom, who by means of violence seeks a place for himself in society. At the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, we meet him at his lowest point. He's spent half of his existence in jail and now, wherever he goes as a "free man", his life still tastes like a prison cell, like the naked drive to survive. When, fresh out of jail and without a cent, he savagely rapes someone he's met by chance, beating her into submission so she'll work as a hooker, he also begins a journey that takes him into his past and the stations of his own brutalization, but also to his future: He begins to write his biography and thereby gradually frees himself from his milieu, alcohol and his love-hate relationship with women. A voyage through recent Austrian history through the eyes of a pathological perpetrator and loner.