Six months after Germany’s infamous cannibal Armin Meiwes was jailed for killing and eating another man, one of the country’s most controversial film directors is to make a film of his bizarre life.
Rosa von Praunheim’s film is to be entitled Your Heart in My Brain, and is expected to be shot later this year.
A film foundation in one of Germany’s wealthiest federal states, North Rhine-Westphalia, has given the director its blessing, and a â,¬20 000 grant.
”It’s controversial, but we think anything by Von Praunheim is worth supporting,” Erna Kiefer, the foundation’s spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Meiwes’s story provoked worldwide headlines in January when details emerged of the crime. In March 2001, the 42-year-old engineer killed Jürgen Brandes, a man he had met through the internet, at his home near Rotenburg. Over the next few months, Meiwes consumed part of his victim.
At his trial, Meiwes presented the defence that his victim had consented and wanted to be eaten. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in jail for manslaughter.
Von Praunheim said his film would show Meiwes in his prison cell, talking to his victim’s head. The head apparently asks Meiwes to eat him again.
On Tuesday, Axel Wintermeyer, a member of Germany’s rightwing opposition Christian Democrats, from Meiwes’s home state of Hessen, described the film as perverse. ”By making it you are erecting a memorial to a perverted criminal,” he said.
Meiwes is writing his autobiography. – Guardian Unlimited Â