What are the high spots of this year's program?
So far I've seen a half a dozen or so films on the festival's largest program to date. This means I'm still looking forward to discovering some of the program highlights, though I can offer a few pointers.
An obvious strong point this year is the retrospective of films from the old DDR (Communist East Germany) to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I'm looking forward to this rarely seen work, especially Solo Sunny, the story of a touring rock'n'roll singer. The film, directed by Konrad Wolf, is given a rave wrap in the fascinating documentary Eye to Eye - All About German Film, an intriguingly subjective historical overview in which film industry figures including Wim Wenders, Tom Tykwer, Doris Doerrie and Michael Ballhaus discuss a favourite film each.
Another film programmed to commemorate the anniversary is One, Two, Three, a briskly chucklesome Cold War comedy scripted by its director Billy Wilder and his regular writing sidekick I.A.L. Diamond, and starring James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive and Horst Buchholtz as an East German Communist. Wilder, was of course born in Austria and gained early experience in the German film industry before becoming the revered Hollywood director of such classics as Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot.
Also on the program are new titles from Wenders (Palermo Shooting), Nowhere in Africa director Caroline Link (A Year Ago in Winter - pictured above), Yella director Christian Petzold (Jerichow), Elementary Particles director Oskar Roehler (Lulu and Jimi) and this year's Oscar winning short film, Toyland, which will be screening before the feature Peaceful Times.
Worth noting is the latest screen adaptation of Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane's classic novel of adultery in middle class Germany, previously filmed on at least three other occasions, the last time by Fassbinder in 1974 when it starred Hanna Schygulla. This time a female director takes the helm, Hermine Huntgeburth, with Julia Jentsch (The Edukators; Sophie Scholl) in the title role.
Effi Briest is only one of a number of strong women's stories on the program - part of a general trend in German cinema and TV drama that shames Hollywood's poor track record in this area.
Hilde, directed by Kai Wessel), is the story of Brodway and screen icon Hildegard Knef (played by Heike Makatsch), while another female musical biography, Clara, centres on the life of composer Robert Schumann - played by Germany's most prominent female movie star of our era, Martina Gedeck.
Showing yet again that the German TV drama is producing work that challenges and sometimes even surpasses the work of its feature directors is 12 Means: I Love You. This is another powerful female story based on real life, this time about a political prisoner in Communist DDR who fell in love with her prison guard. The relatively little-known Claudia Michelson gives an extraordinary lead performance in a film that incidentally bears some intriguing parallels with Ryszard Bugajski's great 1982 Polish drama, The Interrogation (banned under the Communist regime but seen internationally after the collapse of the Iron Curtain).
Happy viewing! Please return regularly to compare notes with myself and my colleague Peter Krausz as we work our way through the program and record out thoughts. And of course feel free to comment, debate and yes, even virulently disagree with anything we have to say.
