“Butty“ was Julius‘ and Moritz‘ graduation film for the “Berliner Hochschule für Technik“. Developing and writing started in September 2022, and the final deadline for the film was in September 2023.
Due to time management issues, only the first half of the script was produced. There are some obvious mistakes throughout the film that we didn‘t have time to fix until our initial deadline.
This is a renewed version of the original film we uploaded to youtube in 2023. It now contains music and some of the most glaring mistakes were fixed.
After uploading the film to youtube back in 2023, we got a lot of positive feedback, and three weeks later decided to take the film offline again to submit it to film festivals. After we got disqualified from the “In The Palace” Festival in Bulgaria because our film was “already online”, we found several websites that reuploaded our film without our permission and quickly got them taken down. Just to be safe we didn’t miss any, Moritz used a still of Butty and put it into Google Lens. What we found was shocking. Someone by the name of Samuel Felinton published Butty as his own under the title “T-130”, won festivals, and visited talk shows explaining how he made the film. In June 2024, we get in contact with several lawyers but have to accept pretty early on that taking Samuel to court would be very expensive and a matter of years. We decide to take fate into our own hands, fly to the USA, and confront Samuel about his theft.
We made a documentary about this crazy story. “Der talentierte Mr. F.” is now free to stream on ardmediathek.de (https://1.ard.de/felinton?c=proj)
