At 12 it was Angel Dust. At 13 it was heroin. Then she took to the streets.

The Image of a Generation.


Helmed by director Uli Edel, this West German coming-of-age drama is the tale of an aimless teen-aged girl, played by Natja Brunkhorst. In search of kicks, Brunkhorst falls in with junkie/pusher Thomas Haustein. Christiane F boasts a generous chunk of concert footage featuring David Bowie.


In 1975, 12-year-old Christiane Felscherinow lives with her mother and little sister in a small apartment in a typical multi-story concrete condo building in a dull neighbourhood in the outskirts of West Berlin. She's sick and tired of living there and has a passion for singer David Bowie. She hears of Sound, a new disco in the city center, labelled as the most modern discothèque in Europe. Although she's legally too young to go there, she dresses up in high heels, wears makeup, and asks a friend from school, who hangs out there regularly, to take her, too. At the disco, she meets Detlef, who is a little older and is in a clique where everybody experiments with various drugs. At first she takes pills and LSD, and goes to a David Bowie concert in which she meets Babsi, a girl of her same age and tendencies, and tries heroin for the first time by snorting it. But soon after Christiane falls in love with Detlef, and in order to be closer to him begins using heroin on a regular basis, gradually delving deeper into the drug and ending up as a full-blown addict. As her time at home is replaced with time spent at her cohorts' unkempt apartment, she is also drawn to the seedy Bahnhof Zoo scene, a large railway and subway station notorious for the drug and sex trade in its underpasses and backalleys. There she also begins prostituting herself, with handjobs at first, imitating her boyfriend who also sells himself to homosexual clients on a regular basis. She steals at home, too, sells all her possessions, and debases herself to abysmal levels. In one of the crudest scenes, Christiane is jumped in a filthy, blood- and urine-soaked stall by an older junkie who forces her to surrender her loaded syringe and proceeds to inject himself with it right in the neck in front of a terrorized elder woman who happens to be in the lavatories too.
Christiane is discovered collapsed on the bathroom floor of her home and with the help of her mother and stepfather tries going cold turkey along with Detlef; their withdrawal period is depicted with extreme realism in all its bodily aspects. Right after, though, they relapse as soon as they visit the Station again. Christiane and Detlef then find their best friend and roommate Axel dead by overdose in their flat and run away, ending up in Detlef's homosexual clients apartment for a few days. When Christiane walks in on the two men having very loud anal intercouse, she freaks out and desperately runs to the Station to find her girlfriend Babsi, only to discover she was found dead by overdose, too, at barely 14 years of age. She then tries to overdose but the movie abruptly skips to offcamera voiceover that says eventually Christiane recovered but most of her cohorts either died or are irrecuperable.

Release Date: March 18, 1981 @ The Plaza

Distrib: New World Pictures