On January 7th 2005 an asylum seeker, shackled at his hands and feet, dies in a fire in cell number five of a police station in Dessau, Germany. The Police claim that he set himself on fire even though he was fixated – one of the biggest scandals in Germany surrounding racist police brutality.
With CELL 5 – A RECONSTRUCTION, Mario Pfeifer reconstructs the case of Oury Jalloh’s death using legal documents, testimonies, audio-visual archives, and collaborates with the forensic expert Iain Peck to reproduce an accurate fire experiment. All in an attempt to answer the question: how could Oury Jalloh burn to death?
In this hybrid documentary, the director embarks on a search for clues that also serves as forensic evidence. Dennenesch Zoudé plays a fictitious investigator, who unravels the case with us; original witness statements from the police officers at the time are spoken directly into the camera by citizens. It is precisely these distancing effects that create an atmospherically and argumentatively dense film – intelligently told, partisan in the best sense of the word and enlightening.