Or Janni Schenck is, anyway.<\/p>\n

In case you’ve missed the flurry of posts, after fifteen years when for most of them I didn’t think I could write it, after two years of buying every second-hand book I could find and being that sad bloke with the bookshelf full of broken-spined books with black hakencruzen on them (well, if you don’t know it won’t matter, will it?) and a good bout of pneumonia early last winter that I sat through in a daze, I finally wrote the story of a kid of fourteen who was beaten-up by his schoolteacher to save his life.<\/p>\n

Why me? Because I won the BBC Writers Room screenplay competition in 2013. Because I heard this story first-hand from the man I always thought of as Janni Schenck.<\/p>\n

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There were lots of odd things about it. I don’t remember writing for more than twenty minutes, for a start. Pneumonia isn’t all bad, apart from the feeling that you actually really seriously genuinely might die of this. But I didn’t die and when I came out the other side of it 135 pages of properly-formatted feature film script was there in front of me. The day the first draft was done I went on Facebook and met Christa Muths, who had that day coincidentally finished her factual book about German anti-Nazi resistance. And yes, there was a lot of it. And a lot of it was covered-up, for all sorts of reasons.<\/p>\n

There being no point in this screenplay sitting in my desk drawer it needs to be made into a film. Film Suffolk like it a lot. But they estimate it needs about \u00a310 million to get it made, as tanks, airplanes and German villages don’t come cheap. So the best plan I have is to go to the Cannes Film Festival and buttonhole people there until I latch on to someone with the courage and the vision to make a film of the truth.<\/p>\n

There’s a snag. I don’t have the kind of money or life that allows me to flit off to Cannes and hang out with film directors whenever I feel like it. I’ve sorted some cheap accommodation\u00a0at sixty euros a night. But I still need money for fares, entry into the Festival, entry to the Marche du Film<\/a> and living for ten days while the Festival goes on.<\/p>\n

You can help in lots of ways. You could contribute directly, but even if you can’t do that you can also help by just sharing this appeal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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