Art House Film

"Too much rain? Pink blossoms against the grey!" Have a great week.


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

It's official. Wim Wenders' latest project «Everything will be fine», which he had been scouting for in Ontario last year, will be filmed in Canada in English and in 3D (as he had announced at our Goethe Directors Talk last September that there is no turning back for him on this technology, see below). On the cast: Wenders' friend Sarah Polley.

«Everything will be fine», written by Norwegian screenwriter Bjørn Olaf Johannessen and backed by 600 000 Euro in financing from German regional film fund Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, is said to be an episodic family drama (set in Norway?), where a 40-year old writer accidentally runs over a young boy and then gets closer to the child's mother and brother. Wenders production company Neue Road Movies announced the plot as follows: "One day, driving aimlessly around the outskirts of town after a trivial domestic quarrel, Tomas accidentally hits and kills a child. The accident marks him for the next twelve years, as we follow the event's implosion in Tomas' everyday life. Will Tomas be able to move on? Will he ever be able to look in the mirror and see a man, not a murderer?" The storyline is reminiscent of Matthias Glasner's drama "Mercy" about guilt and redemption in the dark Scandinavian winter at this year's Berlinale (see below).

The film is rumored to finish production in time for a Berlinale premiere in February 2013.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

"is this art or is it just kaputt? (seen on Queen St West)"


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

Dagie getting ready for her alternative film processing workshop at LIFT on May 16:

"Dark brown brewery-scented soup (made of coffee, soda, vitamin c) turns Kodachrome super 8 film into a high-contrast orange-toned black & white negative!"


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

"Find the hidden super 8 camera! Early Saturday morning … my camera on self-timer, filming a coffee scene that's going to be part of a short film I'm going to develop in … coffee!"




"Once the owners have gone the pets have fun."


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

"Summer has finally come to Toronto and everybody smiles, even a coffee mug!"

Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

Rarely has a made-for-TV production by one of Germany's most prolific directors been met with such unanimous enthusiasm from the media, audiences and arthouse programmers alike. We will be premiering Dominik Graf‘s 10-part Berlin thriller on love, death, and the Russian mafia over three suspenseful nights in our series GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox in May.



"Addictive." (Stern magazine)

“The shooting of the film was a disaster -- the result is a masterpiece.”

“Violence and poetry have rarely been so close as in this fantastic production.”
(Spiegel magazine)

"Has there been a better German crime series in recent years? We can’t think of one." (TV Movie)

“A milestone in German TV history.” (Die Zeit)

“A great epic, with a flood of stories that keep you rooted to your seat.”

“A daring story about duty and guilt --but above all about the difficulty of positioning oneself as an individual in a world where one is defined by oneʼs origins.”
(Christoph Terhechte, head programmer at the Berlinale)


Don't miss your one and only chance to see our 3-part presentation of In the Face of Crime at GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox May 7, 10 and 14.
Email Jutta at arts@toronto.goethe.org to win a pair of tickets to all screenings.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Hope you’re enjoying Toronto's Hot Docs right now, the world’s second largest doc film festival. You might also enjoy –or not— the raging discussion about the impending death of the documentary as a genre and a market. From “Funding docs getting tougher, filmmakers say” (CBC) and “Cuts and funding terms put documentary films on hot seat” (Globe & Mail) to “The creeping de-Canadianization of docs“ and “Docs get action, but can they survive?” (both Toronto Star).

Let me pitch in from a European perspective: “The German documentary film has an audience, but no budget” read an article by Cathy de Haan two years ago, lamenting the fate of dedicated documentary filmmakers as TV channels commission less and expect flattened content and quality for it. But hope does lie in international collaborations (certainly evident in Hot Docs' German selection this year) and new channels and innovative formats (see Toronto's Kat Cizek's interactive 360° web documentary Highrise , featuring 49 stories from 13 cities, told in 13 languages),

The Goethe-Institut is doing its part to celebrate, support and promote the format and make sure it is going to be part of our visual, social and political future: For nearly 10 years, we have been awarding the The Goethe-Institut Documentary Film Prize at Dokfest Leipzig. It comes with a €2000 cheque but perhaps more importantly, the Goethe-Institut acquires the rights to the film so that it can be shown at Goethe-Institutes and our film partner institutions around the world, from Novosibirsk to Havana. To make each film accessible to a worldwide audience, the Goethe-Institut also arranges subtitling in up to ten languages.

Let’s assume for the time being that reports of the documentary’s impending death are greatly exaggerated. The success of our special screening of the ambitious innovative format “24 Hours Berlin” by Volker Heise and Thomas Kufus this March seems to give reason for optimism. And then there's AG Dok, Germany's feisty professional association and vocal lobby group.


See you in the cinema! ...and don’t miss Benjamin Kahlmeyer’s Meanwhile in Mamelodi (see photo above) + another dozen worthwhile and engaging German docs at Hot Docs 2012.


P.S. A few days later Nisha Pahuja's "The World Before Her" won "Best Canadian Feature" at Hot Docs. At the premiere, the first thing the producer mentioned was that "the first ones in" to commission the Canadian film was German TV ZDF/ARTE.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Good morning, Lake O & Canada, how are you?

Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

Dagie Brundert is finding friends fast in Toronto.


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

Dagie Brundert taking a picture from her Berlin window before getting on the plane to Toronto.


Berlin super 8 artist Dagie Brundert is the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence 2012 and will guest photo blog here over the month of May.

Berlin super 8 filmmaker Dagie Brundert is packing her bags as I write this:
She is about to arrive in Toronto as the inaugural Goethe-LIFT Filmmaker-in-Residence. She will engage in workshops, super 8-based city explorations and two presentations of her work, as well as a trip to Windsor's Media City Film Festival. Details on our web site next week.

Asked “When I think of Toronto/Canada I imagine….“, Dagie answered expectantly (& still from Berlin)...

".... a high and wide sky, the flavour of maple syrup lingering in the air, a dynamic variety of alternative and funky culture and lots of lovely quirky people!!!"

We'll see how we live up to this excited expectation in a post-residency Q&A in this spot in June. In the meantime, Dagie Brundert will guest blog right here over the next few weeks with visual impressions of her Toronto adventures and endeavours.

A special thanks to Ben Donoghue and LIFT for their dedication & much appreciated partnership in this new international film residency.



by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Actor, director, writer, producer – Dominik Graf, who turns 60 later this year, is as versatile as few German filmmakers. The innovative trilogy Dreileben by Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler, and Christian Petzold was the event of last year’s Berlinale (and was subsequently shown at TIFF 2011).In the Face of Crime, which he wrote and directed and which premiered at the Berlinale 2010, will be continue our focus on “Berlin on Film” in our ongoing series GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox in May.

The son of two actors started out at the top: He received the Bavarian Film Award for his 1979 graduation film Der kostbare Gast at Academy for Television & Film and has amassed nine Grimme awards throughout the highs (Die Katze) and lows (Der Sieger) of his career. “I wasn’t happy with my own films. The Bavarian Film Award though was a huge –and unexpected—acknowledgment. After that I thought for the first time: Oh, perhaps you will be a director after all!? And still it took years before I liked to watch my own films,” he commented on the early years.

Graf’s thriller The Cat (1987) won him the German Film Award for Best Director. In the genre, he found his greatest successes. “I only like police thrillers. Okay, I can live with a private detective – but a thriller without an investigator leaves me cold. My hero is the one who searches for the truth. The darker the mirror he has to look into, the better the story. The detective has to find his own way out of the darkness.” is Graf’s recipe for success.

His influences came from the industry’s misfits and mavericks – directors such as Arthur Penn, Claude Sautet or Nick Roeg, about who he wrote a book ("Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen”, 2010). When asked what is good cinema, he replied: deviant, subversive, vicious, funny, lively, and please never dignified.

Recently, he has contributed to the celebrated collage Deutschland '09 - 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation alongside Tykwer, Akin and others. For his contribution (Der Weg, den wir nicht zusammen gehen) Graf chose an intriguing and thoughtful mix of documentary and essay film to broach the issue of the disappearance and displacement of history through architectural examples. Already with his TV movie Bei Thea (1986), Graf had established himself as a sensitive director of films around German-Jewish issues. At this year’s Berlinale, he premiered his documentary Lawinen der Erinnerung about the late TV author Oliver Storz’s life from the last days of the Second World War to his recent death.

His next project as writer-director looks like a departure: The romantic history drama Die geliebten Schwestern about a pair of sisters who both fell in love with dramatist Friedrich Schiller in 1788 will start shooting this summer.


GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox: In the Face of Crime
Monday, May 7 (Part 1)
Thursday, May 10 (Part 2)
Thursday, May 14 (Part 3)

Written and directed by Dominik Graf. World premiere at the Berlinale 2010.

6:30pm each (doors open 6:10pm); Cinema 5, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto
Tickets $10 per night; day-of sales at the TIFF Box Office
With English subtitles
Open to audiences 18+


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

A bit of time travel this week: Silent Toronto brings Murnau's 1924 The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) with live piano accompaniment this Sunday.

Legendary German director F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece offers us a peep-hole view into the life of an aging hotel porter (star actor Emil Jannings), too enfeebled to carry out his tasks, who is demoted to the role of bathroom attendant. The film explores integrity, pride, and the importance of rank and uniform in post-World War I Germany,

With one exception, the film’s lack of inter-titles offers the audience a more immersive, purely visual experience, courtesy of master cinematographer Karl Freund. The portly actor, who later starred alongside Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel, was the first German film star to prosper in the United States. And whereas flappers like Louise Brooks or Clara Bow could convey their intentions using a coy smile or the batting of an eye-lash, Jannings expresses his fall from grace using his entire body.

Only twenty-nine at the time, Jannings’ performance is one of the most lauded in silent film history. As Matthew Josephson wrote in the contemporary Masters of the Motion Picture: “The idiotic old creature is interpreted with as much eclat, sympathy, intimacy, and frankness, as let us say, Chaplin interprets Chaplin.”

Featuring live piano accompaniment by Laura Silberberg.
Introduced by Charlie Keil, associate professor of Cinema Studies, University of Toronto.
Preceded by Glimpses of Toronto, a late 1920s silent travelogue showing Toronto at the time of the film’s Ontario premiere in 1928.

Directed by F.W. Murnau
Written by Carl Mayer
Starring Emil Jannings, Maly Delschaft
75 mins | 16mm

Sunday, April 29, 4pm. Revue Cinema, 400 Roncesvalles, Toronto. Admission $12 non-members / $10 members

@imagesfestival's "Talk to the Pie": #KerenCytter says about her performance work "I'm between failure and 'well received'".

#KerenCytter @imagesfestival about set design: "I don't like big sets, I don't want the actors have to justify the set."

#KerenCytter @imagesfestival about creating performances: "I give the actors the script - and then it's a nightmare."

#KerenCytter @imagesfestival projects subtitles mirrored. Excellent left-right brain exercise.

#KerenCytter @imagesfestival: "The stage is the reality."



by Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut