Manitu’s Shoe Walks onto U.S. Movie Screens

One of Germany's biggest blockbusters, Manitu's Shoe (Der Schuh des Manitu), premiered in the United States on Monday. Debuting at the AFI film festival in Los Angeles, it is one of few German movies ever to make it across the Atlantic. Manitu's Shoe, directed by Michael Herbig, is also a rare example of a German movie dubbed into English.

"The movie is so over the top in every aspect that it is not disrupting to see a dubbed version - not even for the American audience, which is very critical in this respect," said Dirk Schurhoff, head of film distributor Beta Cinema.

It is hard to imagine how a subtitled version of the comedy would work, since much of the fun stems from the movie's lingo. The main characters of this Western parody, chieftain Abahachi, his blood brother Ranger and Abahachi's gay twin Winnetouch (a pun on Germany's most famous Indian novel hero, Winnetou), all speak with a strong Bavarian accent. In the American version, Winnetouch likes to let drop a smattering of French, while the bad guy, real estate broker Santa Maria, chats away in highbrow Oxford English.

"It was a lot of work to cast the voice-over specialists, because we wanted to get the voices and specific dialects right," said Heiko Muller, sound engineer at herbxfilm, a film production company that produced the film together with Constantin Film and Seven Pictures.

Manitu's Shoe, which attracted 12 million German viewers, has also been shown in Spain, Brazil, Hong Kong, South Korea, Turkey and eastern Europe - each time with a country-specific use of dialects. In Russia, Manitu's Shoe even started out as the most popular German film ever.

The director of Manitu's Shoe, Michael Herbig, who also plays the character of Abahachi, is well-known to the German audience for his TV comedy show Bullyparade.