Entries by Lynden Barber

Welcome to film lovers in Canberra and Perth, where the festival has just opened. My colleague Peter Krausz and I have been writing about some of the films on this year’s program since before the festival opened in Sydney and Melbourne- you can scroll down and discover more about some of the films screening.

I’m glad to see both the ACT and Western Australian programs include three of my personal highlights from this year: STOPPED ON TRACK (see the two posts below), SLEEPING SICKNESS, and CRACKS IN THE SHELL.

The last-named, directed and co-written by Christian Schwowchow, is a very interesting spin on the story archetype last seen in Darren Aronofsky’s US Oscar-winner, Black Swan. This time the protagonist is not a ballerina but an emotionally vulnerable young actress named Josephine (Denmark’s Stine Fischer Christensen), pushed to the brink by a manipulative and sexually exploitative stage director.

What really marks out the German film from Aronofksy’s however is the non-generic approach he takes to the material. Instead of the former’s deliberately extreme (sometimes bordering on the hysterical) blend of melodrama and horror, CRACKS IN THE SHELL is a naturalistic and probingly psychological drama built around a rivetingly virtuosic performance from Christensen.

This insightful film is not only a compelling investigation into emotional vulnerability and the abuse of power but also into the nature of acting and notions of personal authenticity.

Making quite a contrast is SLEEPING SICKNESS, a hauntingly strange and structurally bold tale of Europeans in Africa focused on colonialism, medical aid and corruption in contemporary Cameroon.

Continue reading "A cracked actor - and a ... »

I confess to being both surprised and heartened by the news that Andreas Dresen's film, STOPPED ON TRACK, has won the best film prize at the Lolas, the German academy awards (see Peter Krausz's story below).

I found this brave, unsentimental drama about a middle-aged family man named Frank Lange (played compellingly by Milan Peschel) with an incurable brain tumour, to be one of the standouts of this year's festival. All credit to the programming team for selecting it for the festival because it's easy to put this kind of film into the "too hard" basket.

While film festivals should ideally always present a variety of different cinematic moods and styles and subject matter, the desire to attract the broadest possible audience should never out-shout the need to present the kind of experiences that are more challenging yet ultimately profound and haunting, the kind that remind us of what it means to be human.

Extremely hard-hitting, indeed tough to sit through at times, STOPPED ON TRACK is ultimately deeply moving because it embraces the truth of the human condition with such candour and such empathy. It is a sincere and deeply felt examination of mortality, love, pain and family.

There are moments that make the viewer flinch - the young son undiplomatically asking his father if he'll inherit his mobile phone, is one - but these are precisely the scenes that will make the film live in the memory.

A personal standout so far: Hannes Lang's visually stunning Alpine documentary, PEAK.

A portrait of the ways in which climate change is affecting the Alps in different countries, PEAK is loosely in the tradition of such master documentary makers as Austria's Michael Glawogger (Megacities; Workingman's Death) and Germany's Philip Groening (Into Great Silence) in the way he eschews commentary or politicking to patiently let his themes seep out of the material.

Just as important is the formality of his filming method - carefully composed images, a still or scarcely moving camera mounted on a tripod or tracks, and unusually long takes that allow viewers to drink in the invariably magnificent mountain vistas.

The Alpine tradition is of course an established one in German cinema going right back to 1929's White Hell of Pitz Palu. Here however we see a new take on this material - a modern look at disappearing populations caused ultimately by the lack of snow, and huge, vastly expensive schemes to create artificial snow in the hope that visitors will not desert the ski resorts.

Lang's images are frequently breathtaking and sometimes - as in the visions of brightly lit artificial snow-fans working at night - memorably bizarre.

Hollywood Reporter ran an interesting interview with IF NOT US, WHO director, Andres Veiel, last year when this latest film on Germany's notorious terrorist gang of the 1970s and '80s premiered at the Berlinale.

"In his award-winning documentary Black Box BRD, Veiel looked at the so-called "second generation" of Germany's notorious left wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction, or R.A.F," wrote the Reporter's Scott Roxborough.

"In IF NOT US, WHO Veiel goes back to the origins of the R.A.F. in the 1960s, looking at the lives of R.A.F. founding members Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader and that of Ensslin's husband, the author Bernward Vesper, who sympathized with the R.A.F. but did not become a terrorist...

"HR: There are already a number of German films on the R.A.F. Why make another?

Continue reading "Leftist terrorism - a new ... »

Stephan Rick's THE GOOD NEIGHBOUR is an effective thriller that recalls Dominik Moll’s 2000 success Meet Harry, He’s Here to Help along with various Hollywood “cuckoo in the nest” thrillers of the 1990s (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle et al).

Trouble begin for lonely journalist, David (Maxim Mehmet), freshly moved to the provinces from Berlin, when he fails to report the death of the young woman cyclist he accidentally runs down on a country road after earlier chatting her up at a local nightclub.
Continue reading "Big chills from the ... »

SBS TV's film website has been giving extensive coverage of the festival, with full-length reviews of eight of the titles screening; interviews with new festival and Goethe-Institut Australia head, Dr Arpad Soelter and SUMMER WINDOW's Berlin-based director, Hendrik Handloegten; and a guide to five of the best films.
Continue reading "Extensive festival coverage ... »

This year’s Berlinale awarded its Alfred Bauer prize for innovation to a Portuguese film titled Tabu after the 1931 Fritz Lang film.

That prize winner, directed by Miguel Gomes, is to screen in this year’s Sydney Film Festival, and has nothing to do with Christoph Stark's feature, Tabu – Es is die Seele…Ein Fremdes auf Erden, screening in the 2012 Audi Festival of German Films under the English title of TABOO – THE SOUL IS A STRANGER ON EARTH.

Now we've cleared up the potential confusuon, Stark’s film is about the putatively incestuous relationship between Austrian poet Georg Trakl (Lars Eidinger) and his younger sister, Grete (Peri Baumeister).


Continue reading "Taboo: illicit desire in the ... »

Last year I wrote about Tom Tykwer's latest film, THREE, when it premeired at the Sydney Film Festival. Now it's getting a national airing as part of the Audi Festival of German Films, this seems an oppoprtune moment to rervive those notes:

THREE, the latest from one of Germany’s most successful filmmakers, Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run), marks a return to more personal, German-language storytelling following excursions into big-budget, globalised movie-making with Perfume: the Story of a Murderer and The International.

THREE uses the same device as US filmmaker Miranda July’s partially-German funded but American-set The Future: a long-established but child-less couple hit mid-life road bumps, not so much out of incompatability as plain old ennui and routine, leading to extra-marital exploration followed by personal crisis. After this, their lives will never be the same. Continue reading "Tom Tykwer's tale of a ... »

Against the best efforts of the weather gods, last night (Wednesday April 18th) marked a successful opening for the Audi Festival of German Films in Sydney with a screening of the madcap political farce, HOTEL LUX.

You might imagine some of the guests being deterred from turning up by the monsoonal storm raging outside. Not a bit of it. The Chauvel cinema was full for the film - introduced by its visiting writer director, Leander Haussmann, who grew up in the East Germany, with some sobering words about the “anti-human ideology” of not only Nazism but also Communism.

The one thing that dictatorships of both the Fascist and Communist type have in common, he added, is their total lack of a sense of humour – an observation setting the scene for a film that, for all its fantastic elements, is rooted in distaste for political extremism and totalitarianism whether from the right or the left.


Continue reading "Festival opener Hotel Lux ... »

A trend continuing in popularity in German cinema is the exploration of cultural clash - usually wrapped around the allied themes of refugees, multiculturalism and racism. This year's program has several films reflecting this interest.

High on my personal must-see list is Maggie Peren’s exceptionally well-reviewed COLOUR OF THE OCEAN, in which a German tourist on the Cayman Islands discovers a group of African refugees in detention, leading her to helping one of them.

But does this lead to a positive outcome? Film industry bible Variety praised this “muscular, moving thriller with a three-sided perspective on the moral complexities of immigration,” adding that Peren “juggles the multiple perspectives of her story with aplomb. The narrative never bogs down in rhetoric; nor does the viewer get led astray.”

Similarly impressed was the European-based Screen Daily, which called it “immensely impressive” and “compelling. Peren illuminates important questions of responsibility, compassion and moral duty but within a collection of richly textured human stories. The result feels accessible and touching rather than worthy or overly didactic.”
Continue reading "How to navigate the film ... »

Now the program for 2012’s Audi Festival of German Films is online (37 titles this year including shorts) I thought it might be helpful to classify the films according to common themes, styles, genres and other elements, the better for German film lovers to explore what’s on and make their bookings.

Film festival programs are not the easiest to navigate at the best of times. Generally the bigger and better the festival, the harder to get your head around. So many enticing titles. Where to begin? Hopefully this blog can help.

Continue reading "How to navigate the film ... »

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.
Continue reading "German films shine at the ... »

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....


Continue reading "Another remarkable ... »

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.

Continue reading "The 21st Century European ... »

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.”

Continue reading "November is German film ... »