Des teufels lehrling - Mickaels geschichte

'After three days, I had turned into an animal', Belgian-born Turk Mickael Suphi says about his years as a torturer ('the devil from Eskesehir') in the service of the Turkish army, after fourteen years of keeping silent and fleeing. He looks for an explanation for his actions in his childhood: pestered by his family and – then still being a rare foreigner – his peers. With Rambo as his great example, he fought himself a way through his adolescence into the Turkish army, away from his family, in the hope of finding a new life. His head for languages, his fanaticism and abstract hatred of Kurds brought him to a special unit: the counter-guerrilla. In ten days, he became a specialist in torturing prisoners. Every time, fear for his life got the better of his conscience. His eventual escape marked the beginning of a life as a solitary fugitive, until he decided to speak up in the hope of putting something right. Mickael’s story is interlaced with images from director Wilfried Huismann’s reconstruction of the story. In the Turkish town of Eskesehir, Huismann searches for possible witnesses and survivors, as well as the torture chamber. He encounters opposition from the Turkish government, who label Mickael a liar, and fear from people involved. 'Many Turks don’t believe that torture takes place', Mickael says, but archives of the human rights organisation, which is intimidated by the government, reveal the facts of the matter.