All About Me is based on the biography of German comedian and presenter Hans-Peter "Hape" Wilhem Kerkeling. It chronicles his childhood and family upbringing, growing up in the countryside of Recklinghausen in the 1970s.

The German title, Der Junge muss an die frische Luft, is transliterated as "This Boy Needs Some Fresh Air", which sounds like a euphemism describing a hyperactive child (that's my best non-confirmed linguistic guess anyways). It would have been a more suitable English title than "All About Me".

Director Caroline Link, who previously won an Oscar for Nowhere In Africa, skillfully balances comedy and tragedy with precise timing. The script captures that feeling of everyday time passing that Richard Linklater was shooting for in Boyhood, though the story covers a much shorter timespan. The audience effectively watches the Kerkelings watching Hans-Peter grow up and get to share their joy. When tragic things happen, you've realized you have become a part of the family and you are sobbing with them. Ready the tissues, this is a tearjerker. It's August now so it might be early to say this, All About You is the nicest cry you will have at the movies this year.

Julius Weckauf delivers a great child actor performance on par with a young Dakota Fanning. He possesses the acting chops, the presence and comedic timing, which is the rarest skill to have at such a young age. The boy is the star of the show and sufficiently in carries the film through its hilarious and the serious moments.

What was moving about All About Me was that it captured the joy of family in its best conditions. It is unrequited love, having a mutual support system, and endless inside jokes. As someone who works in education, how the Kerkeling family raise Hans-Peter is a great standard that parents and teachers can refer to. It illustrates the possibilities when you go along with a child's interests, instead of rejecting them offhand on the account of social norms or conventional thinking.

Hans-Peter has a natural God-given theatricality and develops a comedy bug as a child, doing impersonations of old ladies at the local mom and pop shop. When Hans-Peter wants to dress up like a woman for a local festival, his family encourages it, despite the occasional grimace from other families. "Just do what you want to do and forget what other people think," Hans-Peter's grandmother tells him. The routine of performing spontaneously improvised comedy bits for his family becomes the seed for his future comedy career.

All About Me is on my current top ten of 2019. It was serendipitous that I got to see it having perused its poster display walking out of Pain and Glory in a Taipei movie theater. It was a box office hit in Germany. If the film is released in your local arthouse cinema, go have a good laugh and a good cry.

"Der Junge muss an die frische Luft" is a new German 2018 movie directed by Caroline Link who is still mostly known for the Oscar-winning "Nirgendwo in Afrika", even if her popularity also here in Germany has faded a bit since then. Writer is Ruth Toma, very experienced throughout the years and probably among the most known and most respected female German screen writers. So their collaboration here sounds promising for sure as the required competence behind the camera seems to be surely there. Of course Toma is "only" adapting a book by femous German comedian Hape Kerkeling here. Not too long ago his pilgrimage was brought to the screen as well and now we have his childhood. Looks like he just won't make it out of the limelight here in Germany, even if his career as an entertainer and host seems to be a thing from the past as of now as he has not been on German television for a long time. Of course he also is not acting in here. Instead you find a whole lot of other fairly known German actors here like Heyer, Möhring (the other one),Król and Werner. Plus there's cameos by Amft and Kroymann. Young Hape is played by Julius Weckauf and this is his first performance and actually his name (translated "wake up") fits very well as he adds a lot of charm and I am 100% certain we will see him in a whole lot of other films in the future.

This movie is a mix of drama and comedy. The ways in which young Kerkeling acts and shows mannerisms and knowledge we know from him so very well brings in a lot of fun. Some people laughed out loud in my audience too, okay I did not find it that funny, but it was okay all in all with the many references about entertainment, homosexuality and music too. As for the dramatic part, there is focus on his dying grandmother and also his mother struggling with depression before dying at a way too young age herself. I don't think the drama was always working 100%, but most of the time it did. For example the scene when we see young Hape dancing and singing in the red light his mother used earlier with his grandmother watching was certainly fairly touching. Still the film never becomes a sob story and I think it is more about comedy than real drama as a whole. The title summarizes it very well. Two thirds comedy, one third drama perhaps

I want to mention one scene near the end in particular, namely the one including Amft where you could genuinely wonder why this scene was included in the movie as honestly it did not add much except a few laughters. But we need to keep in mind this is all based on a book and this scene was included there too, so why not use it in the movie. And besides it was kinda funny, the comments from the grandma afterwards, the obvious attraction from Hape's father and of course the parody eventually by Hape himself. This scene you could certainly describe as the "simple life" I mentioned in the title of my review. Another would be the scene when the woman from the child protection authority comes around and sees how things go (Kroymann) with the grandparents taking care of the boy and if they manage and get along. There is also a bit of fear before that how it is gonna turn out, but she is eventually really friendly and understanding and it is also simple and easy there. But these scenes should not make anyone forget about the more serious moments, especially the death references. Sure you never know how much got lost from Kerkeling's mind and memory into his book and how much got changed from the book to the screen, but even if you don't see it as a 100% accurate childhood biopic, you can still enjoy it from the fictitious point of view. After all, basically every non-German and English speaker especially will most likely never have heard about the really well known entertainer Hape Kerkerling is here in Germany and even without that connection they can and should check this film out. I give it a thumbs-up. Go see it.

"Der Junge muss an die frische Luft" is the movie adaption of the autobiography of German tv-entertainer Hape Kerkeling. It tells mainly his childhood years and the story of how he grew up in rather difficult conditions.

I expected very little from a German biographical film about a tv personality, even though I value Hape Kerkeling. However, I was very pleasantly surprised about the seriosity of this film and the tough questions it raises. Yes, the film often is funny and makes you laugh but it's always a rather bitter laugh because it is never fully innocent. The film sheds a lot of light on how a small boy from a Western German town could grow up to become a nation-wide star and the answer is a sad one. You see that it is a German production, you won't mistake it for a Hollywood film but the emotions are nonetheless real and especially the child actors are tremendous.

All in all I would even recommend this movie to people who don't know who Kerkeling is. It is a movie about the traumas we cause our children much more than it is an autobiography only and raises all the right questions.