ECHTZEIT by Hellmuth Costard and Jürgen Ebert is a film like thoughts. About reality and the digitalized world. A film about Ruth and Georg, who may no longer exist. A film about "imaginary cameras", synthetic landscapes, about (flight) simulators and Pershing II.

In Little Godard. To the Production Board for Young German Film, Hamburg’s experimental filmmaker Hellmuth Costard used a Super 8 film system he developed himself that allowed for numerous Super 8 cameras to be synchronised to each other during filming. “Power to Super 8!” was the cry before video cameras became ubiquitous, a low-cost solution for amateurs and even independent professional filmmakers. The content of the film is bookended by an application for a subsidy in which Costard formulates his objection to using the screenplay to evaluate a potential film project…

Hollywood opening credits with crashing sea waves and expectant orchestral music opens the film. Then the viewer's gaze is carried through a room. In a mirror you see for a moment a naked girl holding the recording subjective camera under her arm, she pulls open a drawer, puts the camera inside and closes the drawer. The viewer's gaze and thus the viewer himself is caught in the darkness.

Pornography in the service of politics. An outrageous provocation, this attack on reactionary German legislation discriminating against young film directors, features head-on, close-up shots of a penis ‘mouthing’ the parliamentary defence of the law by its author. This is followed by masturbation of the organ by an anonymous female hand, ending with ejaculation into the camera and a close-up of a nude behind ‘blowing’ out a candle (with appropriate sound). A landmark in political pamphleteering, the film was selected for the 1968 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival by a committee of leading German critics, and promptly banned by the (social-democratic!) city government, causing the withdrawal of almost all German directors from the festival and a national scandal. The title satirically refers to the official certificate of ‘Particularly Valuable’ given each year to the best films by an Establishment selection committee.