Michael Brynntrup’s first 8mm feature: an autobiographical travel diary made in Italy (1981) in which the young filmmaker films his own journey and mounting self‑awareness - his coming‑out, identity search and flight from Germany.
The Bed opens with Jamie, a young man, looking round an old, deserted country house. Through flashback we see Jamie as a boy, scared out of his wits when his older sister and her boyfriend, left alone in the house to babysit Jamie for the evening, play cruel tricks on him.
It begins in the days after Sadat's assassination in 1981 by an islamist cell of army officers. The American media had led an outpouring of shock and grief in the United States at the death of the heroic president.