This is an offshoot of the thread about what movie have you seen.
I have searched and searched, but can't find that thread, so I post it here, because this is a movie you will be wanting to see!:
Yesterday at Bergen International Film Festival I saw a fantastic historic movie:
12 Meter ohne Kopf / 12 paces Without A Head. (From 2009) It's a lavish German movie about the 14/15th century pirate Klaus Störtebeker, the scourge of the Hanseatic League both in the North Sea and the Baltic. Ok, nobody knows much about the historical Störtebeker, of whom there are lots of legends, so there is little problem with the accuracy of the actual events, but the environment is so extremely well re-created, both all the dirt on land, in a medieval village, and in a sailing ship out on sea. (The only inaccuracy I could spot was that they were cooking a salmon and not a more typical salt water fish!) And the human drama is also extremely good: Love, death, friendship, loyalty, confidence, fate - all the big epic conflicts. The actors do a superb job and there is also a lot of enjoyable slap-stick comedy. Of course the film would have been perfect (but hard to understand) in Low German, but it's in High German with English subtitles.
Only the Hanseatic League figures in the movie, but because the pirates of Störtebeker's kind were engaged as maritime mercenaries in the huge political conflicts between the Hanseatic League, Queen Margrethe of Kalmar Union fame and her rival Albrecht of Mecklenburg, it also gives life and blood to this fascinating chapter of North European history, which is rather unknown in the English-speaking world. (Because England's historical and histographical focus has been almost exclusively on both sides of the Channel and not on both sides of the North Sea.)
