BERLIN -- The week-long BerlinBETA media festival opened here Wednesday night with a premiere showing of 23, a biopic based on the short, chaotic life of German hacker Karl Koch. Loosely associated with the Chaos Computer Club in the mid-'80s, Koch headed an independent group not sanctioned by the CCC that stole relatively non-critical data from US government computer systems and sold it to the KGB during the final days of the Cold War.
The central focus of the film, however, is not so much the hacks as Koch's obsession with the works of Robert Anton Wilson, and in particular, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Koch began hacking under the name of that novel's hero, Hagbard Celine, and everywhere he looked, he saw the fingerprints of the Illuminati -- pyramids, political assassinations, and the number 23. As it turns out, conspiracy theories and mountains of cocaine are a dangerous mix, and after a few rounds of therapy, Koch drove deep into the forest north of Hannover and killed himself on 23 May 1989.
The hacking episode, portrayed with acute attention to the historical accuracy of the equipment available and the lax security measures taken a decade ago, resulted in newspaper headlines and Clifford Stoll's bestselling The Cuckoo's Egg -- though Stoll isn't even mentioned in 23. "We did extensive research and worked on the screenplay for over five years," says producer Thomas Woebke. "We met Stoll and heard that he was working on a film of his own. So we decided to focus on Koch -- his character, his obsessions, and his story."
The film opens all across Germany in January 1999 and will be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival next month. If the film is well received, Woebke and his crew hope to score a distribution deal for the US.
Meanwhile, BerlinBETA -- whose young, up-and-coming organizers, Marc Wohlrabe and Stefan Balzer, readily admit was thrown together in just a few short months -- continues. The media congress is actually three events in one: a film festival, a series of conferences, and a "happening." It's where new and old media convene, along with theater people, multimedia entrepreneurs, journalists, and techies.
