“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.”

“A highly intelligent and topical film, Glossary of Broken Dreams is an engaging epistemological documentary that will have you chuckling about, choking on, and considering the validity of, your political ideology.”

“Sometimes it feels as if the entire content of Wikipedia would be rammed into your brain with a USB stick.”

“Glossary of Broken Dreams is a nerdgasm of creative consciousness meets good intentions and abundant doses of intellectually informed human compassion. It’ll fuck with your mind. Then laugh.”

“Everybody spouts bombastic words. Resistance! Privacy! Activism! Market! The Left! And yet, no-one really knows what they mean – or what can be achieved with these argument killers.

...and then I go about explaining the political terms and concepts of the early 21st century that,
to me, seem to be the most important. My aim was to assess these concepts and, where necessary, to sacrifice them. Death to the golden calves!

I also grew up in a time when there wasn’t much aside from popular culture. Even people like Marcel Reich-Ranicki or other prophets of the educated bourgeoisie were presented to me through TV-channels and in TV-cockfights. When would I ever go to the theater, or a museum, or a real concert? There was no authenticity. The world was made of color points on a Grundig TV set. “World” was merely the perception of copies of copies of copies, and even the original was already an interpretation. This situation is problematic, especially with regard to growing up politically. I was 16 when the USSR was dissolved. As a kid, I was afraid of the Eastern Block and cultural products such as Rocky IV or Red Dawn only fueled my fear!

Now, 25 years and dozens of digital revolutions later, we are faced with the fact that communication possibilities are in ruins.

The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called ‘stories’, to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable.

We live in times of radical attention economy, after all.

I think that distinguishing between originals and copies is a non-issue.

Humans are copying machines, genetically and culturally. If a cell stops copying, it’s a dead cell. If culture can’t copy freely, it withers away.

One of my examples is the concept of privacy that, at the moment, everyone coddles like a puppy… I think it’s time to change our thought patterns here. Instead of trying to find ways to defend our privacy come hell or high water, we should ask ourselves why privacy is such a major concern for us? Is what we’re trying to achieve here just reformist symptom-control rather than a solution to the underlying problems?

I wouldn’t have made this movie if I didn’t believe that we can do better. Let me be clear about one thing, as stated in the first part of the movie, we’re all part of the problem.

My main objective is to distance myself from the fairy tale of an enlightened public and the utopia of objective news.

In a world of micro-societies, it has become difficult to refer to something like citizens or subjects. What used to characterize a political person in the past has now turned into a fight against absolute fragmentation. I ask myself, though, if this change can be stopped by demanding civic values alone. Open society isn’t the superglue we used to think it was.

My movie is an attempt to rethink old ideas (and therefore, of course, ideologies). I don’t think of that as being pessimistic. To the contrary, it means actively approaching the situation.
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