German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

For our big “Post-Oil City” cluster this season, I have curated a program of shorts called The Future of Energy as part of the exhibition "Post-Oil City – The History of the City’s Future", screening for free at Evergreen Brick Works’ kiln --see last photo of our opening-- every day until July 31.

5 short films, 5 approaches to urban and (post-)industrial spaces in the context of the environmental changes in our world.

Continue reading "The Future of Energy: Left Behind" »

Watching the mesmerizing, stunning, disturbing and touching punk poem A LOST AND FOUND BOX OF HUMAN SENSATION at our GOETHE FILMS series opening last night --and it worked so well before CRAZY--, I realized I was short-changing (pun intended) our two shorts in this 3-night program on the young, the old and intergenerational relations:

Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: Young & Old Shorts" »

Why is director-writer-producer Hans-Christian Schmid represented twice in our series GOETHE FILMS: Young & Old? (I nearly added a third Schmid film, his 1995 IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE with 21-year-old debutante Franka Potente.) Apart from the fact that he is one of Germany’s best contemporary filmmakers, a thread is running through his oeuvre. One of familial relations, growing up, leaving home --its security along with its restrictions.

Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: Hans-Christian Schmid" »

I am sitting in a hotel room in Germany, watching the (very long) German Film Awards gala. Two acceptance speeches stand out, the shortest and the longest: Both Best Supporting Actor and Actress go to 65+ actors. Michael Gwisdek, who you might remember from GOOD BYE, LENIN!, even wins the award against his son. Christine Schorn, also of GOOD BYE, LENIN! fame, here wins for LIFE IS NOT FOR COWARDS and plays out a little stand-up routine: ”(sighs) So my agent calls and says ‘Christine, I have a job for you, but again … it’s a grandma role.’ – ‘Oh, but I can pull it off, don’t worry!’”, the seasoned theatre and film actress jokes.

TIFF's Piers Handling announced last August that one of TIFF 2012's notable themes was aging --”It seems like the baby boom generation has grown up and is dealing with issues of aging, what it means to age.”-- and for me a motif came into focus that I had felt more than scrutinized for a while, in international (from AMOUR to QUARTET) as well as German films (from the feel good movie BIS ZUM HORIZONT DANN LINKS to the Alzheimer documentary FORGET ME NOT). Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: And if we all lived together?..." »

Landing in Osnabrueck can be a culture "shock" for North Americans. A pretty medieval town in the middle of Germany, sadly bombed and sadly reconstructed, it proudly hosts the European Media Arts Festival -- a great example of what I love about the German arts scene: Despite international perception, Berlin is not the be all and end all. The centres of art production, academic research, and presentation are thoroughly decentralised, with not-always-perfect but gutsy places like Oberhausen or Hof sporting major international events and meeting points. Thus for 5 days, you see Asian and European guest artists navigating their way from the alternative backyard theatre to the "Warehouse" along the old fortified town wall of Osnabrueck in amazement or puzzlement or both.

EMAF is as old as Toronto's Images Festival (26), born out of a time when video was already an established art form but going into technological overdrive with the arrival of the internet. DEceleration in an accelerating media age was one of this year's points of discussion, Continue reading "Decelerating EMAF" »

20 March:
@imagesfestival: Join us Thursday as we unveil our 2013 Catalogue and COMPLETE FESTIVAL LINE-UP!! www.facebook.com/events/147147055450813/ ." Will do!

21 March, program launch:
Looking forward to “spring break“ (in snow storm) from mainstream film fare as @liamlacey so rightly called it: 3 weeks to @imagesfestival

Film fests take note: @imagesfestival's Scott Miller-Berry rightly describes approach as non-competitive, egalitarian and "fair trade". @imagesfestival AD Kate MacKay promises more interiors than at last year's landscape-heavy media arts fest (& again many #Filipino #films).

Continue reading "Images Festival 2013 in 15 tweets + annotations" »

Don’t miss our co-presentation at Hot Docs 2013. Read our guest blogger Diana Kluge's review from Amsterdam's IDFA here:


When I saw THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR for the first time at the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) Amsterdam last year, I was impressed. The documentary clearly demonstrates what filmmaking is all about: telling strong stories you won't forget. The debut by Tinatin Gurchiani takes us on a special journey through her home country of Georgia. She presents us with stories and images of its past and present that will stay with you long after the film has ended.
Continue reading "The Machine which makes everything disappear" »

One of the highlights of this year’s 20th anniversary Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival for us at the Goethe-Institut is that two of the seven German co-productions chosen out of thousands of submissions were produced in collaboration with our colleagues around the world.

Dr. Stephan Wackwitz, who runs the Goethe-Institut Georgia, describes the roundabout way THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR --our co-presentation with Hot Docs this year-- came into being:

“Like most artistic achievements, THE MACHINE WHICH MAKES EVERYTHING DISAPPEAR is a misunderstanding that came to something... Continue reading "Hot Docs 2013, from Tbilissi and Shanghai with..." »

One of the world's most important children's film festivals, TIFF Kids International Film Festival, will kick off in Toronto on 9 April. FAMOUS FIVE by Mike Marzuk can be seen as the closing film in the Features section of this special children's offshoot of the renowned Toronto International Film Festival. Three more German films are also being shown in Features: IGOR AND THE CRANES' JOURNEY by Evgeny Ruman (IL/PL/DE), VAMPIRE SISTERS by Wolfgang Groos and VICTOR AND THE SECRET OF CROCODILE MANSION by Philipp Stennert, Cyril Bos. And three German shorts are featured in the program. But this is only one stop for German children's films in Canada, other films will be shown at festivals in Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax.
Continue reading "German children's films conquer Canada" »

“What parts of this story are autobiographical? It is well known that many German Nazis fled to South America after the war. It is also known that many German Jews emigrated there before or during the war to safeguard their lives. What has rarely been dealt with is how these two groups of people, who emigrated to Argentina within a few years of each other, and who came from the same German cultural circles, were able to get on with each other.

It is an irony of history that the German Jews and the German Nazis in Argentina favoured similar places to live, had similar tastes in architecture, and chose similar places to holiday. Much of the narrative in the film is based on real events. Continue reading "Director Jeanine Meerapfel on My German Friend" »

Buenos Aires in the late 1950s. "Warst du bei den Deutschen?" ("Where you over at the Germans' place?") Sulamit's Jewish-German father asks his teenage daughter. "Friedrich es Argentino como yo!" is her defiant reply. This is the irony and dilemma of displacement, exile and loss of identity in a nutshell, delicately portrayed in Jeanine Meerapfel's MY GERMAN FRIEND, which has played BFI London as well as the Sao Paulo Film Festival.

The Toronto Jewish Film Festival and the Goethe-Institut Toronto are co-presenting the Canadian premiere of
Jeanine Meerapfel: MY GERMAN FRIEND
April 21, 2013, 3pm
ROM Signy and Cléopheé Eaton Theatre, 100 Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON
Watch the (German) trailer here.


Email jutta.brendemuehl@toronto.goethe.org for a chance to win 1 of 2 pairs of tickets to our only screening in Canada. (Only the 2 winners will be contacted.)

Next week: The director's comments on her film, inspired by her own life and family history.

by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

The Berlinale 2013 is over, the circus is moving on (Cannes, Venice, then TIFF). Until then, here’s what I am keeping an eye on in production:

For starters, 3x Wenders: About to launch, his portrait of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgad called SHADE AND LIGHT. Announced for next year, CATHEDRALS OF CULTURE, a documentary TV series in 3D and 2D about the soul of buildings, by a team of six award-winning filmmakers including Wim Wenders and produced by his Neue Road Movies. “If buildings could talk, what would they tell about us?” is the guiding question that clearly harks back to Wenders’ 3D video installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010 of the same name.
And of course, in Canada, we are eagerly awaiting news on Wim’s next (3D) feature EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE with Sarah Polley, still in pre-production.

Continue reading "German films in production" »

Laundry. Waiting. Movement. Music. These were some of the themes that came up during our two-night presentation of the best German and international shorts and the Q&A with filmmakers Oliver Husain, Jasmine Ellis, Phillip Barker and Chris Kennedy in our “Oberhausen on Tour” program at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Continue reading "A short film about ..." »

Wonder why the short films we are about to show you in our next GOETHE FILMS program are so fantastic? Read the Oberhausen Film Festival jury statements to find out.

Winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen 2012:
SNOW TAPES by Mich’ael Zupraner
Israel/Palestinian Territories 2011
Jury statement:
In this work, with a strong sense of political urgency and complexity, the artist provided a camera to a Palestinian family in the highly charged city of Hebron. But instead of a one dimensional depiction of a political conflict, he complicates the viewer's life with a bifurcated screen in which we are confronted not only with the violent reality of the occupation, but also with the glee of the victim when he is able to be aggressive, with the ambivalence of throwing snow balls as both playful and violent, and with the Israeli director himself as someone who stand to gain from representing Palestinian suffering. The result, while raw and rough, is both subtle and evocative, and reconfigures cinema as an active agent beyond the subjective-objective division rather than settle for a passive political role.
Mich’ael Zupraner talks about the making-of SNOW TAPES.
Excerpts from SNOW TAPES.

Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: Oberhausen jury praises winners" »

"I am looking forward to introducing this selection from the German competition of the Oberhausen Festival 2012. Although it is the German competition, the program includes two films by directors from Toronto: “Plan B” by Jasmine Ellis, and my film “Item Number”. And we’ll both be in attendance.

Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: Oliver Husain on Oberhausen" »