Operation White Christmas (2023)

In the age of video streaming, Enis Altmann owns the last video rental store in Carinthia, which he inherited from his father, and has debts of 90,000 euros. His best friend is Domino, a Korean hacker. She finds a businessman named Bob on the dark web who is willing to take over the debt. In return, Enis is supposed to prevent the Kazakh president’s state visit, scheduled for Christmas Eve. Enis and Domino receive help with their mission from the skinhead Manfred, known as Fred. The state visit is to be prevented by making sure it snows at Christmas, because the president will only come if it does not snow. The Austrian Armed Forces plan to spray silver iodide into the atmosphere using Eurofighters and rockets, as is done by hail suppression aircraft in agriculture, in order to prevent snowfall. Fred, Enis and Domino’s mission is therefore to stop the Eurofighters from taking off and thereby make a white Christmas possible. On the police side, Enis’s brother, Colonel Timur “Tim” Olmez Altmann, is in charge of operations. The police officer Lausegger assists him. The two of them and their team are responsible for ensuring that the state visit goes off without incident. They have political backing from Carinthian Governor Adelheid König. Enis eventually manages to shoot down the Eurofighter with a rocket; its pilot is able to bail out by parachute. In a subsequent shootout between the police, led by Tim, on one side and Bob on the other, Enis gets caught in the crossfire and dies in his brother’s arms. Bob is also killed by the police. It starts to snow, and the state visit does not take place. Tim brings a VHS tape from the video store to Enis’s grave, just as Enis used to do for his parents. The viewer eventually learns, at the home of the grandparents, Helmut and Dagmar, that the whole story about Operation White Christmas was invented by Enis. Every Christmas, he tells it to his family, including his young nephew, Tim’s son, embellishing it with new details each time. In real life, Tim is a pilot, not a police officer as he is in the story. Domino is actually Brigitte, and she is pregnant; Enis and Brigitte are a couple. The whole family celebrates Christmas together.