Girl You Know It's True

I LOVED this film! I was a huge MV fan back in the day. I didn't even really care about the scandal... I just loved their songs (I have their second album on CD by "The Real MIlli Vanilli" called "The Moment of Truth," which also has some banger songs on it).

I thought all the actors were terrific, especially the guy who played Farian, and it was good seeing Brad Howell and John Davis get the spotlight. I like that the characters occassionally broke the 4th wall, but not too much.

I enjoyed this so much. I was tapping my foot throughout. Damn, they don't make music like this anymore! R. I. P. Rob Pilatus, John Davis and Frank Farian!

This is by far the best movie I've seen in 2024 so far. I loved watching them explore how exploitative and fake the music industry can be.

It's a shame that the movie didn't get much of an audience outside Germany. I'm actually blown away that the studio never distributed the film in the US, despite the subject matter being so relevant.

My friend and I are Americans living in Berlin and we rented this film on Amazon Prime last night. Surprisingly, there were no English subtitles available, so we needed to use Google Translate for all of the moments when the actors were speaking german. This was a real shame!

Took us about 4 hours to get through and luckily we do speak a little German. We used it as a fun exercise to improve our vocabulary, but I could see this being a major turn-off for other viewers.

First of all let's appreciate the actors! Good cast, good work with them, it worked out well. Then again I was not expecting that it would be bad either, both men favor real life Rob and Fab.

The character who portrays Frank is also a good actor as well. I almost felt that I was right there as the events were taking place.

This movie centers around Milli Vanilli obviously, the story speaks about their chaotic ending in the music industry. Two young men who are blamed for lying about their music and who they were as artist. Yet, it was not just them who played a part in the entire scandal at the end of the day. This film also depicts how shady the music industry can really be!

With this tale, it dives deep with Rob, and why he even had a love for entertaining in the first place , same thing for Fab, both were dancers. Not knowing that later on they would be used as puppets for someone else's work.

Great film, would not mind watching it again. Rest in paradise Rob, you was and still are a great man.

Rob & Fab were the Superstars of 1989 and although I wasn't a fan back than, the hype was felt by everyone. And suddenly it was all over... Simon Verhoeven made a great biopic about the rise and fall of those two guys, that works on different levels. The wall breaking was a nice touch, but what really worked, was the acting of the two leads, who fit perfectly. Combined with Matthias Schweighöfer as Farian the casting was top notch. Of course the script tried to shift the blame from the protagonists and yes, you will feel sorry for them, but what stays, is the fantastic product of Milli Vanilli, that wouldn't have worked without Rob &Fab. The movie tries to give them the credit they deserve. All in all, "Girl you know it's true" is really worth a watch, especially for everyone who was around when it all happened.

To the writers, producers, and storytellers of Girl You Know It's True:

First, thank you.

I came into this film expecting to revisit the pop scandal of my youth-Milli Vanilli, the Grammy, the lip-syncing, the fall. That was the version of the story the world fed me back then. I loved the music. I believed, like many others, that we'd all been duped.

But what I watched was not a scandal.

It was a tragedy.

A human one.

And one that hit me harder than I ever expected.

What you gave us wasn't just the truth behind the band- You gave us Rob Pilatus, the person behind the image.

And as an adoptee, I recognized that boy immediately.

When Rob said,

"I knew why they adopted me. They had something to prove," it was like someone reached into my chest and gripped my heart.

That was not a throwaway line. That was a life sentence.

A truth that every adopted person I know understands too well.

And that brings me to what I need to say:

This film should have included a trigger warning.

You gave us suicide. You gave us addiction. You gave us exploitation.

But the part that broke me-and that will break countless adoptees who watch this-came without a whisper of caution:

The portrayal of Rob's adoption trauma.

You showed the way he was abandoned, shaped, discarded, and ultimately destroyed by a system and a society that never saw the child behind the performance. And of course, as so often happens in real life-the adoptee is the one who dies in the end. The one who carries the most pain. The one who is never allowed to fully heal.

We live in an era where even fictional stories are prefaced with content warnings.

But this? This was a real story.

And you told it well. So well that it triggered something ancient and agonizing in me.

What I want the world to understand is this:

You think adopted children are "better off." You think we're lucky.

You think we're saved.

But unless you've been through it, you'll never truly grasp what it feels like to be

removed from your roots

stripped of origin and story

used as proof of someone else's goodness

and then asked to smile for the camera and be grateful.

Rob was a brilliant, broken, beautiful soul who never got the closure he deserved.

He was a boy who wanted to be seen.

And he died trying.

So again, I say thank you.

Because you told his story.

You honored his pain.

And now, I will honor it too.

But let this be a reminder to Hollywood, to storytellers, to audiences:

Adoptees are not props.

We are not plot twists.

We are not here to be tragic and then disappear.

We are still here.

We are still carrying it.

And some of us-like Rob-don't survive it.

Let his story stay with you.

Because it will never leave me.

Sincerely, Catherine An adoptee A witness A survivor And now-one voice louder.