Film news

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.

Continue reading "Melbourne Film Festival - ... »

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 ... »

I'm looking forward to this year's Audi Festival of German Films, which gets under way in April - you can read all about the line-up elsewhere on this website. But in the meantime I'd like to take note of a couple of interesting stories about what’s been happening in German cinema, both involving the country’s biggest male star (not to mention director), Til Schweiger.

We all know that Hollywood loves remakes. They’ve been doing this for years, with French films a particular favourite. A few years ago Japanese and Korean horror films were all the rage, and more recently it’s been Scandinavian cinema (viz. Let Me In, Brothers and an upcoming US version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Now it’s the turn of German cinema for the remake-remodel treatment. Continue reading "Now it's Rabbit Without Ears ... »

A treat is in store for anyone able to get to this year’s Adelaide Film Festival, which opens on February 24. One of the event’s programming unquestionable highlights is the first Australian screening of the new, restored version of Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, Metropolis, containing 25 minutes of footage cut from the film shortly after its 1927 premiere. Continue reading "Metropolis at the Adelaide ... »

This month World Movies is screening one of the standout achievements in documentary of recent years, German director Philip Groening’s remarkable Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), which patiently observes the daily lives of monks of the Carthusian order in the French Alps over the four seasons of a single year.

In 2006 I programmed this into the Sydney Film Festival, where my initial fears of finding it a hard sell proved, to my great pleasure, unfounded. Unlikely though it may seem, it became the first film on the program to sell out, a response that reflected its success on the European art cinema circuit, especially in Italy and Germany.
Continue reading "Into Great Silence - a great ... »

This month offers a valuable opportunity to revisit and re-examine an acknowledged German cinema classic of the past 25 years with World Movies broadcasts of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire on December 3, 19 and 20.

Watching the film today is a strikingly different experience to seeing it in its original 1988 Australian cinema release. Although it has a loose story of sorts, about two guardian angels (played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) listening to the private thoughts of ordinary Berliners until one of the angels falls in love and decides to become human, the film is less of a dramatic narrative than a poetic reverie on human frailty, history, love and mortality. But most of all this is a film about Berlin itself - not for nothing is its original German title Der Himmel über Berlin, which translates literally as The Sky over Berlin. Continue reading "December 2010 – Looking ... »