David Bennent has a condition which caused him to grow very slowly. When he appeared in this film at age 11, he was 1.14 meters (3 ft. 9' in.) tall. He continued to grow to 1.55 m (5 ft. 1 in), and was still growing well into his thirties.
This was Germany's first film to win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
In June 1997, at the urging of a Christian fundamentalist group, and after viewing a few isolated scenes, an Oklahoma County District Court judge ruled that the film contained child pornography, as defined by Oklahoma's obscenity laws, and was therefore illegal. Oklahoma City police confiscated all copies of the film from libraries and rental outlets, without obtaining the necessary search warrants or court orders. They intimidated video store managers into giving them the addresses of customers with rental copies, went to those homes, and confiscated the movies. The local District Attorney announced that anyone possessing a copy of the movie would be arrested. The D.A. was forced to back down within weeks, and most of the seized videos had been returned by December. By October 1998, after several related lawsuits, U.S. federal courts ruled that the movie did not violate Oklahoma obscenity laws, and the seizure of the videotapes had been unconstitutional. The U.S. Court of Appeals closed the final case in May 2001, and the movie is once again available in Oklahoma County.
For the 2010 long version, the sound of the missing scenes were not found in archives. The actors were called back to record their voices again.
The film is banned in parts of Canada for its depiction of underage sexuality.