Germany – a weapon-free zone. Most people here have never held a real gun in their hands. They try it out with models and simulation games. The film observes an Airsoft club in Bonn where the members copy, down to the last detail, the appearence of U.S. elite soldiers. Only the somewhat inept training sessions reveal that it’s not real soldiers who offer training here. The film accompanies the model builder Matthias Schmeier who assembles delicate dioramas of the Arabian Spring – driven by the desire for clarification of the political and social consequences of arms trade and war. And it shows the film director Dominik Graf staging a corpse. It is the attempt to overcome the impossibility of representing death in film. GUNS presents images of war and violence. But photos and videos of real conflicts are merely the template for the images which the protagonists produce themselves. Whatever their motives are, they have one thing in common: As hopeless as their search for knowledge is, so intensive is their concentration on details. The fictive exhibition of arms and violence becomes permeable for insights about ourselves. And raises the question of which experiences are made from mere games which are brutal reality elsewhere.
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