Combat Girls

Combat Girls (Kriegerin, 2011) is a German drama you can watch online on iFILM. Twenty-year-old Marisa was raised by her grandfather, a Wehrmacht veteran. Now she runs with a neo-Nazi crew where hating outsiders passes for pride.

Marisa, played by Alina Levshin, drinks, picks fights, and plans to ink a portrait of Hitler onto her skin. To fourteen-year-old Svenja, freshly drawn into the gang, she looks like someone worth copying. Then a young Afghan refugee crosses her path, and the neat us-against-them world she grew up inside starts to give way. Walking out of the pack turns out to be far more dangerous than joining it.

Writer-director David Wnendt takes the camera inside the far-right scene without lecturing and without excuses — you see what keeps people tied to that anger and what it costs to break loose. Levshin took the German Film Award for the role, and the film traveled dozens of festivals. Hard, uncomfortable cinema for anyone who cares about the why, not the surface. Stream Combat Girls (2011) online on iFILM.