Audi Festival of German Films Weblog

The festival has now wrapped up for the year, though of course it ended at slightly different times and with different films according to where you were in the country.

For this festival blog it ended last night in Sydney with a screening at the Palace Verona of the latest film from leading Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin (Head On; The Edge of Heaven), a late addition to the program courtesy of Sharmill Films.

Like Akin's vibrant 2005 film Crossing the Bridge about the Istanbul music scene, Polluting Paradise is a documentary set in Turkey, only this time, as the title suggests, its theme is environmental. The setting is the village of Camburnu, home to Akin's grandparents (as we only learn during the closing credits), which nestles in the picturesque Black Sea coastal hills where the locals work on tea plantations.

The location stopped being quite so idyllic following the establishment of a stinking refuse tip in the community's midst, a gigantic municipal facility servicing 80 towns and villages. The locals were given assurances the sprawling garbage heap would neither smell nor pollute the water table or local streams, all of which quickly turned out to be lies. The film follows the villagers' angry campaign against the dump, led by the local mayor, over a period of five or six years.

Continue reading "Good film - but what a load ... »

Last night I attended a well-attended screening of veteran filmmaker Doris Dörrie's Bliss (Glück) at the Palace Verona in Sydney. How much difference can a viewing in a packed cinema make to a film? In cases like this, a lot.

Working from a Ferdinand von Schirach short story based on a true-life incident, Germany's most successful living female director takes the familiar story archetype of a pair of urban waifs or outsiders drawn together (viz. Chaplin's City Lights, Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy and Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge) and creates something utterly fresh and personal.

Irina (dyamic Italian up-and-comer Alba Rohrwacher) becomes a hooker in Berlin after fleeing from her family's farm in an unnamed country during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, where she was raped by the soldiers who had just murdered her parents. Her companion is a homeless young man with piercings and weird hair who lives by begging and scavenging for scraps for his dog.

This makes the film sound like a tough sit, but Dorrie instead is interested - at least initially - in telling a charmingly warm and quirky story of a lost young couple in a hostile world who together seek transcendence.

The film has settled into a nice groove when at around the two thirds mark, Dorrie pulls a narrative shock from her hat.

Continue reading "A blindsider from Doris Dörrie" »

After writing on this blog about Holocaust survivor Philippe Mora’s documentary German Sons, about his friendship with the son of a Nazi Party member, I caught up with Mora to find how the film was being received by audiences.

Many Holocaust survivors have approached him after screenings, which had been "very moving," he said. "I've had people say they hadn't thought about how the children of Nazis must also have been feeling.” One Australian in Sydney with a German family background had told him how her father had told her never to mention her German background, never speak German.

For the veteran Australian filmmaker and for viewers, the film's key theme is the importance of reconciliation. Three days ago Mora was interviewed on ABC radio in Melbourne where his fellow guest was Xanana Gusmão, the Prime Minister of East Timor. As Mora was discussing the need for reconciliation in many places around the world following long and painful conflicts, he felt something touching his hand and, as he looked down, realised the PM was holding his hand. As he continued talking, he felt the grip increasing. "That's the most unusual review I've ever had," said Mora, clearly touched in more than just the physical sense.

Continue reading "Two hands clasped in empathy" »

Continuing from the previous post, the third film on friendship in the 2013 festival is Pathfinders (Pfadfinder), a richly rewarding 1998 documentary by festival guest Georg Maas (whose new feature Two Lives opened the festival in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane). The film follows Norbert and Gunnar, two former childhood best friends in Germany who are still best buddies when they spend time together in South Africa, where the latter lives on a farm property.

The film begins with Norbert, a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair, returning from Germany (where he has returned to live following an earlier period living in South Africa) to stay with Gunnar. The film unfolds without any voiceover or titles on screen to explain any of the back story, leaving it to us, the audience to put together the pieces.

The film is loose and kind of baggy, with some scenes devoted to not much more than atmosphere, but just when you think it might not be going anywhere, Maas starts to gradually reveal his hand. Firstly Gunnar opens up about the road accident on a remote stretch of road where he hit a rock in the road and tipped over his vehicle, turning him into an invalid and seriously injuring his female partner, Caro (who seemed to be recovering when she suddenly died of asphyxiation in the hospital where they had both been taken).

Continue reading "Three films on friendship: ... »

By coincidence this year’s program includes three titles about the theme of friendship, especially across cultures.

The theme is made clear in the title of Jeanine Meerapfel’s My German Friend (Der Deutsche Freund), about the offspring of German migrants to Argentina with different family backgrounds (the first is Jewish, the second, Nazi).

A similarly highly charged theme is at the heart of German Sons, directed by Australia’s Philippe Mora, who like the teenaged female protagonist of Meerapfel’s film, is the offspring of German Jewish refugees. Continue reading "Three films on friendship: ... »

(Post updated with additional quotes, 2.30pm EST, Saturday May 11)

With the festival heading towards its final weekend, I caught up with with its director, Dr Arpad Sölter, who’s been on a packed schedule flying around the country.

That schedule made it initially hard to pin him down (the first two or three times I tried, he was either at or about to visit a local consulate or attend an official event). “I am exhausted, but I’m a happy man," he said when we caught up. "I lost my wallet today at Adelaide airport but wasn’t even aware of it.”

One reason for his upbeat mood is the audience turnout, with “the numbers looking good.” There have been sell-outs for some of the comedies, particularly domestic box office smash The Break Up Man and Russendisko and historical drama Measuring the World. "Last night our Russian Roulette special event in Sydney was just another example. Full house as we like it. People were enjoying very much both Lost in Siberia and Russendisko as well as our complimentary Vodka shoots, Russian food and music in between a lot! The Chauvel cinema was packed!"

He confesses to having been nervous about the selection of The Break Up Man for the main media preview in Sydney, before the festival opened, so had been relieved at the laughter coming from the 80-odd strong journalists – a sign German comedy is be becoming more accessible to international audiences.

Continue reading "As Kafka said..." »

Some good news. The Festival has announced that it has added a last minute title to the schedule - the latest title from Fateh Akin, the leading German director whose previous films including Head On, The Edge of Heaven and music documentary, Crossing the Bridge have helped to pioneer the cinematic depiction of the culture and dilemmas of the Turkish-German community.

The new film, Polluting Paradise, is a documentary, this time with an ecological theme. The setting is the Black Sea Turkish village home of Akin’s grandparents, a veritable paradise until the government decided to develop a garbage landfill site further up the hill. (See below for more information and session details).
Continue reading "New Fateh Akin film, ... »

Though it’s described in the official festival program as a documentary, Marten Persiel’s This Ain't California, about three skateboarding friends in the Communist GDR in the 1970s and ‘80s, has a slightly more complicated status as a "hybrid" – a term denoting that interestingly grey area between conventional documentary and fictional storytelling.

As Persiel told Fairfax's Philippa Hawker, 'I never really set out to make a documentary, I set out to make a movie’. He says he used mix of archival footage using some footage from the time and then extended this “using the same locations, people looking the same, the same camera and film stock, so that in the end you can't tell.''

Audiences react differently when they learn what he has done, he says. ''People say, especially in America, 'This is very accomplished, you did a great job, I was so masterfully fooled,' and I'm really happy about that. And the other reaction - in, for example, my own country - is the odd person who says, 'This is fraud, I feel betrayed.' Really angry reactions sometimes.'' He understands that people can be confused and not know what to make of the film, but that's in part what he intended."

But as a filmmaker, ''It's my job to make a film that works and engages them emotionally.''


Continue reading "This ain't a documentary - ... »

Director Georg Maas officially declared the 2013 Festival of German Films open last night at a packed gala screening at Sydney's Chauvel Cinema before a screening of his film, Two Lives (Zwei Leben). This was followed by a Q&A with the director hosted by Variety film critic Eddie Cockrell.

The legacy of life behind the Iron Curtain has become a popular theme in German cinema over the last few years but Two Lives finds a side to the Communist GDR previously unexplored on film – the nefarious influence of the Stasi on East Germans who managed to escape.

In an interview with Australian magazine and festival sponsor Film Ink, Maas said the film had been "very well received in film festivals in Germany. The work of the Stasi in Norway is something the audience did not know about, even in Germany. But what makes all of us who worked on this movie especially happy is that the audience seems to appreciate the way we have chosen to tell this story. Even though all of my collaborators are busy making other films now, they still call me after the festival screenings and ask how it went.

Continue reading "Georg Maas opens the festival " »

This week UK newspaper The Independent reported that environmentalists were hailing “a ‘victory for bees’ after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations.”

If you’re wondering what that has to do with the Audi Festival of German Films, you may be unaware the program features an outstanding Swiss documentary on precisely this topic.

One of the highlights of the festival program, More Than Honey had this viewer’s jaw frequently dropping, both for its startling close-up images of bees (which appear to have been taken from camera strapped to the insects) and the astonishing behaviour it captures.

Continue reading "Life's not all fun and games ... »

Launch day for the 2013 festival is finally here.

This year the event adds a couple of new screening locations, both in regional NSW, and unspools a varied program ranging from wacky comedies and serious tales of the Nazi and Communist GDR eras, to a German take on Mark Twain's Huck Finn and outstanding documentaries on two threatened species - bees and German folk music.

The event kicks off tonight (April 30) in Sydney, tomorrow night (May 1) in Melbourne, and Friday in Brisbane (May 3) with gala screenings of Two Lives (Zwei Leben) attended by its director, Georg Maas. The mystery-thriller film, set mostly in Norway and discussed briefly in my last post, offers a new and unexpected twist on the Stasi films of recent years.

After this the festival rolls out around the country new addition Newcastle kicking off at Tower Cinemas on Saturday (May 4) with Hotel Lux (seen last year in other parts of the country); Canberra on Tuesday (May 7) with The Adventures of Huck Finn; Adelaide on the Wednesday with Two Lives; Perth on the Thursday (May 9) with Hotel Lux; and finally another new venue, Byron Bay's Palace cinema, opens on Friday (May 10) with Summer Window for a three-day season.

For reports and opinion on the films in the program keep checking this space for regular updates by myself in Sydney and my colleague Peter Krausz in Melbourne. Scroll back a little and you’ll find my views on some of the program highlights as well as Peter’s report on the winners of this year’s German Film Awards, the Lolas, and his views on the Austrian drama Atmen (Breathing).

Meanwhile SBS’s film website has posted an overview of this year’s program by Peter Galvin as part of a candid interview with Goethe-Institut Australia’s director, Arpad Sölter, who’s in charge of the festival.

Continue reading "And we’re off. Almost…" »

BREATHING (Atmen) at first seems a grimly unlikely choice for Austria’s entry in this year’s Academy Awards best foreign film category, but this directorial debut from Karl Markovics, best known as an actor, is artfully crafted to gradually creep up on the viewer. Slowly it works its way from a cold portrait of a totally unsympathetic character – an angry and alienated young man on parole who can’t hold down a job - to someone for whom the viewer feels great empathy. Terrific cinematography aids the effect.


THE BREAK UP MAN (Schlussmacher)
Germany’s string of recent domestic rom-com hits have borrowed from the slickness of Hollywood populism with one intriguing twist. What in the US is generally female-centric becomes in the hands of German filmmakers a (usually critical) look at the male of the species.

Director Matthias Schweighofer also stars in this energetic entertainment - part rom-com, part buddy comedy - which managed the feat of knocking The Hobbit from the top of the German box office charts. He plays Paul Voigt, a jerk whose job is to deliver the bad news to people whose cowardly partner has dumped them. This is an unlikely scenario for a male bonding comedy but it works.

Schweighofer’s easy-going charm makes his character more bearable than he might have been, but the real delight is the performance of Milan Peschel as his unwanted new sidekick, Toto – a neurotic eccentric who needs close supervision to prevent him from committing suicide. I’m only now starting to get a grip on Peschel ‘s extraordinary versatility and range as an actor. Last year he was named best actor at the German Film Awards (an honour repeated in the Bavarian and the German film critics’ annual awards) for his devastating portrayal of a man with terminal brain cancer in Andreas Dresen's Stopped on Track. But here he's every bit as impressive in a comic register, a sort of Jiminy Cricket to Schweighofer's Pinocchio.

DOLL, THE FATSO AND ME (Puppe, Icke & der Dicke) is something I haven’t seen from Germany before, a droll and utterly deadpan black comedy, loosely in the vein of Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki (Leningrad Cowboys), the US’s Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train) and Belgium’s Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern (Louise-Michel).

A brief plot summary gives something of the amusingly nutty flavour: mishaps ensue as an unlikely trio meets up while on the road – a height-challenged and unemployed courier known as The Bomber; a corpulent mute; and a blind young French woman looking for the German father of her unborn child. Filmmaker Felix Stienz is fascinated by faces, and in Tobi B’s Bomber (the “me” of the title) he has one that repays repeated attention.

With the opening of the 2013 Audi Festival of German Films only one week away, I’ve been delving into the program in advance and have compiled a guide to some of the highlights (I may return to look at some of these films in more detail during the festival).

Part One:

TWO LIVES (Zwei Leben) is set immediately after the 1990 reunification and blends two recent traditions in German historical films, stories concerning the Nazi era on one hand, and the legacy of the Communist GDR on the other. The woman linking the two is Katrine Evensen (Juliane Koehler), born to a Norwegian mother and German father during WW2, taken away by the Nazis to be raised in what would become the GDR, and now, following an apparent escape, living a happily settled married life next to a Norwegian fjord.

Director (and festival guest) Georg Maas initially appears to promise a well-meaning, socially conscious tale, one that delves back into a now discredited stolen-children policy in the vein of the UK-Australian drama Oranges and Sunshine. But gradually it becomes a very different story; from quiet and unexceptional beginnings a dramatic, complex and incredible story emerges.

THE WALL (Die Wand) is a captivating, hypnotic film in which one woman (Martina Gedeck) trapped behind a mysterious invisible wall in the Austrian Alps is forced to confront her own sanity and relationship to the world around her. During her time as a prisoner she records her ruminations – both philosophical and practical – in a diary (heard in narrative voiceover).

Adapted by director Julian Roman Pölsler from a 1963 novel by Austrian author Marlen Haushofer, the film offers an intriguing variation on the conceit behind Luis Bunuel’s surrealist classic, The Exterminating Angel, in which guests at a dinner party found they were mysteriously unable to leave. Thoughtful and quietly intense, the film builds an effective showcase for Gedeck, best known internationally for The Lives of Others, in a visually stunning Alpine setting, often above the clouds.


INVASION
Ample supporting evidence for Burghart Klaussner’s status as one of Germany’s finest screen actors is found in this gripping slow burn of a thriller. The ubiquitous veteran, named best actor in the 2010 German Film Awards for his pastor in The White Ribbon, plays a widower, Josef Mendel, in charge of a sprawling, mostly empty mansion in this cuckoo-in-the-nest tale, written and directed by Berlin-born Georgian, Dito Tsintsadze.

Josef’s lonely life takes a strange turn when his late wife’s cousin turns up unexpectedly with her grown son and the pair become house guests –the first of several people who will exploit the owner’s politeness and reluctance to offend for their own hidden ends. Who are these people really, and what do they want? Far-fetched on paper, the story unfolds with the inexorable logic of a parable, with Klaussner’s masterfully subtle reactions grounding the story in a readily believable emotional reality.