Like a politically charged version of The Fugitive, director Frieder Schlaich's Otomo tracks a man on the run and the police who hunt him. French actor Isaach De Bankolé, best known in the U.S. for his appearances in Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth and Ghost Dog, plays a Cameroon-born, Stuttgart-residing refugee from Liberian political oppression. He's been granted asylum but no work visa, and almost everyone he meets regards him with quiet suspicion or outright derision. When a subway conductor hassles him about a possibly invalid ticket, Bankolé loses his temper and head-butts the hassler. As he attempts to get money to flee the country, the two cops assigned to his case go about their business nonchalantly, gathering information from citizens who reveal their racism even in sympathy. Otomo is based on an actual 1989 incident which sparked a national debate in West Germany about institutional bigotry and immigration laws. The film's 85-minute run time stays confined to the three-hour pursuit and the hour just before the head-butting, summing up the event's repercussions in a text addendum. Schlaich and his screenwriter, Klaus Pohl, are more concerned with crafting an inquiry into the meaning of freedom. The episodic plot consists of a series of encounters with people whose behavior is directly influenced by their varying confidence in their social positions, and even when the title character stands outdoors in a grassy spot in a democratic country, Schlaich frames him as though he were penned in by bushes and trees. Meanwhile, the refugee's landlord grumbles about unauthorized use of a hot plate, and the authorities make knee-jerk assumptions about how "guys like him" behave. Otomo is a morality play in which prejudice, ignorance, and the ravages of poverty lie right on the surface. It's not subtle, but it is effective. Give credit to Bankolé, who initially responds to every gesture, hostile or friendly, with inscrutable silence. He plays his character as a man so unnervingly unknowable that when one cop asks, "What would you do in his place?" his partner immediately answers, "I can't imagine it."