Review by Dirk_van_den_Berg

This film is great - but the producers find it OK that many websites continue calling it a documentary, which it is not. This is docu-fiction, very well-done docu-fiction, perhaps too well-done. Because it blurs the borders between what is real (documentary and archive material) and what is fiction. The main plot-line of the film is written and created, exactly as you would do writing a script for a feature film. The main protagonist - PANIK - is a composition of three real-life characters - and I am not inventing this, I am quoting the words of one of the film's producers. During a recent film and television festival, he and the film were heavily attacked by the jury of the documentary section, where the film was inscribed, for not revealing the truth and actually declaring the film to be a documentary. Ultimately, the film was excluded from the documentary category. What is so bad about this whole thing is not the film itself, which is quite brilliant. It is the tactics around it, and the fact that the producers are not at all forthcoming with the truth about their film. They prefer to feed the "mystery" around it instead of saying once and for all: "This ain't a documentary!"