Happiness Is a Warm Gun is a feature film by the Swiss director Thomas Imbach, who stages the life and death story of the lovers Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian. Between documentary-like scenes and fictional acting, as well as archive material, the narrative of a love story is created, rolled up from its end. Happiness Is a Warm Gun premiered at the International Locarno Film Festival in August 2001. The film won the Zurich Film Prize 2001 and was nominated for the Swiss Film Prize for best feature film and best leading actress. Plot Happiness Is a Warm Gun is about the murder of the green pacifist Petra Kelly, who is shot in her sleep by her life partner Gert Bastian, ex-Bundeswehr-General, before he kills himself. The film begins where the lives of the real characters end. Petra and Gert find themselves in the transit area of a modern airport and settle down in this artificial in-between world, trying to pick up the thread of the past - their political activity - while in their conversations what happened is fragmentary. Cast Linda Olsansky: Petra Herbert Fritsch: Gert Background "After leaving the Bundestag, Kelly lived with her partner Gert Bastian in seclusion in their house in the Tannenbusch district of Bonn. She was seriously ill and suffered from fear of threats (after having received threatening letters). She was on the police's list of endangered personalities, but refused personal protection. According to the police report, Kelly was killed in her sleep by Bastian with his Deringer-type pistol under circumstances that are not completely clear, and Bastian is said to have put an end to his life afterwards, whereby according to a report in Der Spiegel magazine, the gun was aimed from above at a spot just above the forehead. The bodies were found on October 19, 1992 - several weeks after the crime. The exact date could therefore no longer be determined with certainty; the time of death is assumed to be the night of October 1, 1992." Reception "’The bullet‘, says the Petra Kelly figure in this film, ’manages with one intensely warm sensation to dislodge everything in a single moment. It makes its home inside me – that must have been the moment I briefly lifted off.‘ Likewise, the images of Thomas Imbach‘s film seem to thrust aside everything you thought you knew about this historic and mythical couple. The