Nothing is more boring than the truth: “A thousand lines” in the cinema

With “A Thousand Lines”, Bully Herbig made a film about the Relotius scandal in “Spiegel”, which is one thing above all: rock-solid entertainment. The case is a gold mine for satire.

Ein “Spiegel” editor named Claas Relotius writes about sixty texts in his steep, award-winning career, in which much – often it is the protagonists – is fictitious. Yes, in the “Spiegel”, of which the “Spiegel” itself writes that it would not be “what it is without the more than 50 highly specialized fact checkers of the documentation”.

“What he was,” it almost should have said. But the magazine is lucky: it is a man from the company, Juan Moreno, who, against internal resistance, unmasks the star reporter as an impostor. The crisis management machine then runs like clockwork: shock is felt, opinions are meant, reports are declared obsolete, crisis PR is carried out, a final report is written, similar cases are examined in other media and made public, a book is written (by Juan Moreno).