Based On A True Story

From interviews and archive material, the film reconstructs a bank robbery that went down in film history, if not in history - through Sidney Lumet's psychodrama HUNDSTAGE , shot in 1975 , in which Al Pacino embodied the desperate and hapless bank robber Sonny Wortzik. Lumet's thriller was based on a true story. The model for his protagonist in real life is John Wojtowicz , On a hot August afternoon in 1972, he stormed into a Brooklyn branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank and, with his gun in his hand, asked for a prompt payment in substantial amounts - to no avail. Because the police unexpectedly quickly stood in front of the bank and block the exit.Wojtowicz takes eight hostages. The planned express robbery turns into a 14-hour nerve war, a spectacle in which the media take part in addition to police officers and passers-by. At the trial, John Wojtowicz will state that the booty was intended to finance his lover's sex change. When he fined his sentence, he returned to Brooklyn and moved to a house a few blocks from where he was robbed. Since then, John Wojtowicz has lived a life in the shadow of a cinematic memory that is not his. Wojtowicz's account has so far been missing from the many eyewitnesses who commented on the course of the 14-hour hostage drama after the fact and on the occasion of her filming. In You can hear Walter Stokman s film for the first time.