Nordsee ist Mordsee (1976)

Fourteen-year-old Uwe lives with his parents in a high-rise housing estate in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg. His father regularly gets drunk and beats Uwe and his mother. Uwe vents his frustration outside the family: he is the leader of a gang of teenagers. Together, the gang members terrorize classmates and other children. One of their victims is Dschingis, an Asian boy. Uwe and his gang break open a slot machine. Uwe keeps the money for himself, intending to split it up later. Against their agreement, however, he uses the money to buy a switchblade. On his way back from the shop, he spots Dschingis and secretly watches him. Uwe sees that Dschingis has built a raft and is launching it. Later, when Uwe meets up with the other teenagers again, they ask about the money. Uwe says his father found it. The gang members are suspicious, but initially they still stand by Uwe. The next day, Dschingis returns to his raft and discovers that it has been destroyed. Just then, Uwe appears with his gang. They taunt Dschingis again, and he angrily attacks them. Uwe and Dschingis fight, and Dschingis ultimately wins; the others run away during the fight. Dschingis then forces Uwe to help him repair the raft. The following day, Uwe meets up with his gang again. They distance themselves from him because he still has not shared the money from the slot-machine break-in and the incident with Dschingis went wrong. To restore his standing, Uwe mentions that he can drive. Shortly afterward, when a customer leaves his car running at the roadside in front of a nearby bank branch, Uwe impulsively gets behind the wheel and drives off. The joyride does not last long, however, and the police catch him. The officers hand Uwe over to his father, who has been drinking again and is beside himself with rage. He beats Uwe severely. The next day, the marks of the abuse are still visible, and Uwe decides to skip school. He asks Dschingis to excuse his absence at school. After school, the boys meet up. Dschingis offers Uwe a place to stay. His mother, however, is against it because she thinks hiding a child is illegal. Dschingis does not understand and is furious. The two decide to run away together. They take Dschingis’s raft from Wilhelmsburg toward the Port of Hamburg. But the homemade craft proves too unwieldy, so on impulse the two steal a dinghy and continue sailing down the Lower Elbe. After a few hours, Dschingis’s mother notices that her son is missing and files a missing-person report with the police. Uwe’s father learns that his son is missing only when the police tell him. The teenagers spend the night on the banks of the Elbe. The next morning, they realize they are near a juvenile prison—the Hahnöfersand correctional facility—and think about how the prisoners are hardly any older than they are. They continue downriver, approaching the mouth of the Elbe and the North Sea. When a water-police boat picks up their trail, they manage to escape through a shallow strip of reeds into a side channel of the Elbe. They leave their boat and hide on the shore. At night, they break into a kiosk because they are hungry. The next morning, they narrowly evade a police patrol that spots them. Uwe and Dschingis steal another sailboat and set off again. They know they will probably be caught next time. But Uwe says at the end: “Maybe next time. But better to get our asses kicked next time than right now. Think logically! The longer we stay away, the softer the old folks will get. And the people at court.” As the boat is shown against the setting sun, a song by Udo Lindenberg plays, with its refrain, “I often dream of stealing a sailboat and just taking off…,” also appearing on screen as text. This motto also appears on the film poster.