Audi Festival of German Films 2010 Weblog

Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick's 2001 decision to use the festival's competition as an international launchpad for the strongest German cinema has long been a success, and 11 years later it's still paying dividends.

German films have been shining at this year's festival, also known as the Berlin Film Festival, with Christian Petzold's Barbara, set in the former East Germany nine years before the Berlin Wall came down, being much admired.

Apart from praise for Petzold, a critics' favourite in Germany and one of the so-called Berlin School of aesthetically-driven filmmakers, the film's lead actor, Nina Hoss, has emerged as a frontrunner for the acting Silver Bear, which she won previously for the same director's Yella in 2007.

Also worth noting is this year's Berlinale Retrospective, The Red Dream Factory, devoted to the relationship between German and Russian film and the important role it played in the development of cinema aesthetics.
during the 1920s and early 1930s. Among titles included are 1929's Um's tägliche Brot (For Our Daily Bread); 1930's Zeitprobleme. Wie der Arbeiter wohnt (Problems of Our Time. How the Worker Lives); and the celebrated 1924 Russian science fiction film, Aelita.
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I was fortunate enough to see Above Us Only Sky (Über uns das All), the impressive debut feature of German writer-director Jan Schomburg, at this month's Canberra International Film Festival.

In my review for the SBS Film website, I observed that "those lucky enough to have seen Sandra Hüller's Berlin best actress-winning role as a deeply disturbed German school student in Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem will already know she is a remarkable talent. For a while other German filmmakers seemed oddly reluctant to cast her in another juicy role, or perhaps she rejected any that came her way.

"But there's no question this drama by German writer-director Jan Schonburg is worthy of her and will help to propel her to further appreciation and acclaim. Her challenging lead role here as Martha, a happily married schoolteacher who goes off the rails when two police officers arrive ominously on her doorstep, could never work with less than a subtly virtuoso performance, and Hüller more than rises to the occasion....


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Update on my October 31 post on acclaimed German crime thriller The Silence:

Having now screened on SBS2 the film is now available for free viewing online here, at SBS On Demand. You have 11 days left.

Watching Swiss-born director Baran bo Odar's film last night I could see where the comparisons with the brilliant Danish teleseries The Killing (Forbrydelsen) and its US remake came from, while being struck by how significantly it differs from them.

It's true that both film and the two teleseries revolve around the murder/ disappearance of girls several years apart, and share some common plot details including the discovery of items belonging to the victim in a field preceding discoveries of their bodies in a nearby lake or canal.

But unlike the German film, The Killing is essentially a conventional police procedural/ whodunnit puzzle. Knowing a murder has been committed, we follow the police as they pursue their various leads and red herrings, mostly emanating from municipal politics and all its dirty dealings. The story just happened to have been done in unusual depth and with great dashes of intelligence and visual style.

With The Silence (original title Das letzte Schweigen - literally "The Last Silence"), there's never any mystery about the identity of the killer/s. We see a rape and murder of a girl in the golden wheatfields of the Bavarian summer.

We clearly see who did it before being introduced to the detectives assigned to a later, parallel case - the discovery of a missing 11-year-old girl's abandoned bicycle in the same spot as the first girl's cycle was found around 20 years ago.

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November is a rich month for German film programming on Australian TV, with SBS Two running a focus on German cinema throughout the month. I’ll skip over the most well-known title, the Oliver Hirschbiegel-directed Downfall (9.30pm, Tuesday 1 November), about the last days of Hitler in the bunker, since it’s been the subject of a truckload of commentary and debate already, and Chris Kraus’s Four Minutes (9.30pm, Tuesday 15 November), which I wrote about on this blog back in May.

Of the three remaining films, the one I’m keenest to see is Swiss-born director Baran bo Odar’s 2010 serial killer movie The Silence (9.30pm, Tuesday 8 November), which opened in UK cinemas this week to strong reviews with both London’s Daily Telegraph and The Guardian finding similarities with the acclaimed Danish crime teleseries, The Killing.

The Telegraph’s Tim Robey said the film, in which the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl evokes memories of an unsolved murder in the same spot 23 years before, was “a wholly absorbing and surprisingly nuanced piece of work, while The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said “everyone should rush to see this icy and gripping police-procedural thriller from Germany.”

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One of this year's most striking film phenomena is the release of art films conceived and shot in 3D – a medium previously associated with big budget Hollywood filmmaking - by two of the leading German directors who emerged from the country’s Neue Welle of the 1970s, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

Earlier this year I examined Wenders’s breathtaking dance film Pina, celebrating the legacy of the late, great Wuppertal-based choreographer Pina Bausch. On the 22nd of September Australian audiences have the chance to see Herzog’s first foray into digital 3D with the commercial release of his documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

The filmmaker, these days based in Los Angeles, was granted special access to the Chauvet cave in France, where the oldest human cave paintings were discovered in 1994. The cave has since been closed off to the public in order to prevent these priceless rarities – more than twice as ancient as the oldest cave paintings previously discovered - from being damaged.

Where Wenders’s use of three dimensional cinematography brought to life human subjects in constant movement, Herzog’s subject is by its very nature static. Before seeing the film I wondered how this could possibly work. On the face of it this hardly sounded a promising topic for the use of 3D. Yet viewing Herzog’s footage the reason behind his choice of medium becomes quickly apparent.
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After Germany’s leading film producer Bernd Eichinger passed away in January, I observed on this blog that “his death leaves a huge hole. Who – if anyone – will fill it, and how, remains to be seen.”

But from its level of production activity there’s no sign his production company, Neue Constantin Film, is exactly about to give up the ghost. Having made such films as The Baader-Meinhof Complex, Perfume, The Downfall and The Wave – among many other well-known titles – Constantin has recently announced major new projects.

These include The Poison Kitchen, based on a best-selling book about the true life story of anti-Nazi newspaper The Munich Post (Muenchener Post).

Also in the pipeline for Constantin’s Robert Kulzer is a remake of the Winnetou movies, originally adapted for the screen from beloved German storyteller Karl May’s western tales in the early 1960s. The writer of the new scripts is Michael Blake, an interesting choice given he wrote Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning revisionist western, Dances With Wolves, and a logical one given the pro-native American themes of the Winnetou tales.
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Good news if you live in Victoria or are visiting this month. A number of intriguing German titles are screening in the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), which has already opened and runs until August 7. The festival has usefully gathered information about these on a single web page here.

Less usefully, you will quickly discover that many of the films listed are international co-productions, some of which may not display any German characteristics other than the fact they've been part-funded using German money, an issue I looked at in my post about the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) in June.

In terms of pure German content, a number of items immediately leap out. The first is Tom Tykwer's lively comedic love triangle Three, which I wrote about when it screened in SFF.

There's also At Ellen's Age from director Pia Marais, described by the festival as "a warm but biting coming-of-middle-age drama" with "a magnetic performance" by (French actor) Jeanne Balibar.

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Finding out what titles on a film festival program are from a particular country used to be a straightforward affair. The nation of origin would usually be displayed prominently on the entry for each film, often at the top of the page.

These days, with international co-productions increasingly common, it’s become much harder to find out the national identity of a particular film. This year’s Sydney Film Festival (SFF) program (8-19 June) lists no less than 21 titles as being from Germany, but look a little closer and it becomes clear that relatively few of these are what we might uncomplicatedly describe as “German films”.
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In the past couple of decades it seems a new rule has emerged in film. Pianists and their teachers must always be emotionally or mentally troubled; or at least, just a little bit crazy. Examples include Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Scott Hicks’s Shine, and French thriller The Page Turner (in which the young woman who turns the pages for a concert pianist turned out to have more sinister ambitions for her employer).

I’m not how to explain this tendency, but note that these films are intriguingly different from one another, made by respected or even revered directors, and feature outstanding performers.

A further example – well worth catching - turns up on SBS2 on May 21st in the form of German director Chris Kraus’s award-winning drama Four Minutes (Vier Minuten). In this accomplished, 2006 film set inside a woman’s jail, a deeply disturbed but gifted teenager called Jenny (played by the rising Hannah Herzsprung) reveals a prodigious musical gift while serving time for murder. Continue reading "A breakout performance for ... »

Interesting to see the always impressive Bruno Ganz starring in two films in this year’s festival. The first, Sophie Heldman’s Colours in the Dark, is a soberly intense Bergman-esque drama about a grandfather struggling to come to terms with retirement, prostate cancer and his wife's (Senta Berger) discovery of a personal secret. The film was a surprise box office success with art house audiences in Germany – surprising because the story goes into the kind of dark places not often associated with commercial successes.

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The word “masterpiece” is best used with caution with regard to new artistic works. That said, Wim Wenders’ dance film Pina may be the first genuine masterpiece of digital 3D cinema.

In this new film devoted to the innovative and highly influential “dance theatre” of the late German choreographer Pina Bausch, the director has mapped out exciting new expressive possibilities for the medium of cinema.

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In the frantic lead-up to tonight's opening in Sydney (followed by other capital cities on successive nights), I asked festival director Klaus Krischok to cast a quick eye over what looks like an especially stimulating program for the festival in its 10th year..

Among the more obvious highlights is PINA, Wim Wenders' 3D documentary about Pina Bausch. Wenders will be a festival guest, arriving in Sydney with only 90 minutes to spare before its Sydney Opera House screening commences (let's hope the road authorities have fixed the traffic lights to green, as they did for IOC members pre-Sydney Olympics decision!)

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