By day Jakob Fabian writes cigarette advertisements; by night he walks Berlin until the streets empty out. Dominik Graf's Fabian: Going to the Dogs, a nearly three-hour German drama from 2021, follows a man drifting through a city that is about to lose its footing.
What is Fabian: Going to the Dogs about?
Berlin in the early 1930s is loud, broke and wide awake. Dr. Jakob Fabian holds a doctorate and a copywriting job at a cigarette company, neither of which he takes especially seriously. The work pays the rent; what interests him is the night, when he wanders through bars, back rooms and rented flats, watching a capital that has stopped pretending everything is fine. Into this restless routine steps an actress, and Fabian falls for her with a seriousness he has not applied to anything else. Love gives his aimlessness a direction for the first time. But the same city that brought them together is one where money runs out, jobs disappear overnight and ambition has a way of pulling people apart, and the film keeps its eye on how much of Fabian's private happiness can survive the public collapse gathering around it.
About the cast
Tom Schilling and Albrecht Schuch anchor the ensemble, alongside Saskia Rosendahl, Meret Becker, Eva Medusa Gühne, Elmar Gutmann, Petra Kalkutschke and Michael Wittenborn. Graf gives his actors long scenes and a great deal of talk, and the performances are pitched to feel caught rather than staged, in keeping with the film's loose, roaming approach to its period.
Context & significance
The original German title, Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde, translates roughly as the English one: going to the dogs, meaning sliding into ruin. That phrase describes both the central character and the Berlin he lives in, a city at the end of the Weimar years when unemployment, political violence and hedonism ran side by side. Dominik Graf's film is unusually long for a drama at 176 minutes, and it uses that length to wander rather than to hurry toward a plot. Period detail sits next to modern filmmaking choices, so the era feels lived-in rather than embalmed. For viewers interested in interwar Germany, or in how a society talks itself into disaster one evening at a time, it is one of the more distinctive German-language titles in the K-Time catalogue.
Watching Fabian: Going to the Dogs on Ktime
Fabian: Going to the Dogs is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so the long German dialogue scenes can be followed in Farsi either way. Reading this page costs nothing; watching requires you to log in with a K-Time account. Everything from search to playback is presented in a Persian-language interface built for Iranians living abroad.