My American Cousin

Not everyone has a cousin like Balthazar Getty: a Hollywood actor and musician, the proud, loving father of four children, a keen boxer and motorbike rider and the son of John Paul Getty III. Severin Winzenburg’s cousin Balt is cool, good-looking, successful and the life and soul of every party. They are close – “he was always like a big brother to me” Severin explains – but in the middle of the 1990s they almost lost contact. Getty’s life had been taken over by drugs. He was consuming cannabis, cocaine and heroin in large quantities. David Lynch’s Lost Highway was supposed to be his biggest success as an actor, but Getty didn’t even manage to make it to the première. He was an emaciated junkie; a wreck – but this was his turning point. In 1998, with the help of his friend Timothy Ford, Getty went to Mexico and got clean. Now he has entrusted his cousin with the video footage of his painful rehab – a journey into the abyss of drug addiction and the route to recovery. (DOK.fest München)