Premierentour: Adams Acht // Tipp

Premiere Tour, including a panel discussion with guests and lead actor Oliver Masucci

Presented by: German Sports & Olympic Museum, Cologne

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Film Synopsis

ADAMS ACHT tells a moving story of courage, solidarity, and the fight against limitations—and how a group of underdogs caused a sporting sensation at the 1960 Olympic Games. A gripping underdog drama and a masterpiece of narrative cinema.

Ratzeburg, late 1950s. A small town on the border with East Germany—and the last place anyone would expect a sporting revolution to take place. Here, Karl Adam teaches math, physics, and sports, and encounters a fatherless generation of young men—outsiders and lone wolves—who don’t know what to do with their anger. But Adam sees something in these men that no one else does. He puts them in an eight-man rowing boat and gives them more than just an outlet—he gives them a sense of purpose. Adam’s unconventional methods lead to initial successes, but the officials of the elite German rowing world ridicule and sabotage him. One of the rowers, Hans Lenk, is also struggling against a barrier that is becoming increasingly insurmountable. His great love, Ulla, lives just a few kilometers away, on the other side of Lake Ratzeburg—in the GDR.

As the Cold War casts its shadow over the country, Adam’s team struggles not only with physical exhaustion but also with old questions of guilt, ideological divides, and a past that cannot simply be shaken off. But with unwavering determination and visionary methods, Adam molds these underdogs into something greater than the sum of its parts. And finally, at the Olympic Games, a team that no one believed in takes its place at the starting line—ready to make history…

The film tells the true story of the legendary “rowing professor” Karl Adam. With his eight-man team from the provinces—considered underdogs—he sensationally won the gold medal for Germany at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.