German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

The German entry ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT by Edward Berger, which premiered at TIFF 2022, made history at the 95th Academy Awards®, as one of the two big winners at the Dolby Cinema in Hollywood, Los Angeles.

Nominated in nine categories, the anti-war film took the coveted trophy in four categories: International Feature Film, Cinematography, Original Score and Production Design. This continued the winning streak after seven accolades at the British Academy Film & Television Awards (BAFTA). Continue reading "4 OSCARS for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT" »

GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox is looking at love from all sides with five recent young films on 7+9+14 March 2023. $10 tickets on sale now. In Nico, the self-confident German-Persian nurse Nico enjoys the Berlin summer with her best friend Rosa until a racist attack suddenly tears her out of her carefree life.
When Nico eventually meets the Macedonian woman Ronny, a
connection develops between the two that causes Nico to question
the path she has chosen.

Meet the creative team:

producer, screenwriter and lead actor as Nico, Sara Fazilat

After graduating from high school in Bremen, Germany, Sara attended RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) and Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. In 2012 Sara moved back to Germany to study film production at the DFFB in Berlin and at Columbia University in New York. In 2015, her co-written film Not Too Early, Not Too Late (co-screenwriter) premiered at Cannes. At the 64th San Sebastian International Film Festival, Sara was a member of the student jury for the category International Film. In 2017 she was selected for the Berlinale Talents. In 2018, Sara was selected for the VGF International Producers Programme in Cannes. The film Revolvo, which she produced, won various prizes in 2020 and was invited to Cannes by German Films. Her film Jiyan won, among other international awards, at the Max Ophüls Festival 2020. The same year, she founded the production company THIRD CULTURE KIDS. Nico is Sara's graduation film at the DFFB, which premiered at the Max Ophüls Film Festival 2021, where Sara received the award for Best Young Actress. Later that year, she received the First Steps No Fear as a producer. Continue reading "Why you want to watch... Nico" »

GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox is looking at love from all sides with five recent young films on 7+9+14 March 2023. $10 tickets on sale now. Le Prince is the love story of Frankfurt curator Monika and Congolese businessman Joseph, a chance encounter that turns into an intense and dramatic love affair.

Director Lisa Bierwirth, who has worked with the likes of Sonja Heiss and Valeska Grisebach, on her debut feature's origin story:
The starting point was my mother Susanne’s relationship with her then-husband Erick, who is from Kinshasa, Congo. Continue reading "Why you want to watch... Le Prince" »

GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox is looking at love from all sides with five recent young films on 7+9+14 March 2023. $10 tickets on sale now. Watch the German-Senegalese comedy drama Toubab with us on 9 March because...

"Laid back & very funny!" -- SPIEGEL

"An anti-racist buddy comedy" -- Stadtkulturmagazin Darmstadt

"Anyone who believes that the social ghetto film cannot be reinvented should watch this movie, which effortlessly adds a queer theme." -- epd Film Continue reading "Why you want to watch... Toubab" »

GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox is looking at love from all sides with five recent young films on 7+9+14 March 2023. $10 tickets on sale now. Zuhur's Daughters is one of my favourite documentaries of recent years. After escaping the war in Syria, a family learns to negotiate their new lives in Germany. But when two siblings begin to explore their transgender identities within their newfound freedom, their parents struggle as they cling to strict religious and cultural ideologies.

Directors Laurentia Genske & Robin Humboldt on meeting the family: "What fascinated us about Lohan and Samar was their determination and courage to follow their path to finally live their female identity openly, to be accepted. Continue reading "Why you want to watch... Zuhur's Daughters" »

GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox is looking at love from all sides with five recent young films on 7+9+14 March 2023. $10 tickets on sale now. We're launching the series with a radical Berlinale 2020 hit: In his autobiographical directing debut NO HARD FEELINGS, Faraz Shariat, born in 1994, tells an authentic and at the same time fantastically exaggerated story about the queer adolescence of a second-generation Irani-German millennial – and thus provides a resolute counter-draft to conventional German cinema, in which post-migrant experiences and stories of immigrants and their families are all too often excluded or misrepresented. Continue reading "Why you want to watch… No Hard Feelings" »

Love is love… across genders and geography, communities and conflict, as five new young films prove with verve and wonder – and a lot of (coming-of-age) love. Plays 7+9+14 March 2023 at GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox. Tickets on sale 22 February!
Continue reading "GOETHE FILMS: I have a crush on you (& win..." »

Spoiler alert: I have a new favourite Christian Petzold film. Afire is new in tone but still signature Petzold, melding inspired writing, assured direction, dedicated acting, poetic camerawork and a fresh playfulness and joie de vivre. Petzold’s fifth Berlinale Competition invitation and the second drama in his elemental trilogy alongside the more melodramatic water myth Undine, Afire combines water and fire and brings back Paula Beer, who had won the Silver Bear for Best Actress as Undine.

Afire is young and joyous, laugh-out-loud funny and touching, light and melancholic, and I wanted to see it again the moment I walked out out the cinema. Petzold has told the film’s origin story before, how a Covid infection during Cannes 2020 sent him into fever dreams of love, lust and fire that he set out to manifest in his latest drama, putting other projects aside. Continue reading "#Berlinale23: Afire #review" »

An ongoing series of mini profiles on the blog German Film @ Canada on the movers and shakers that make the Berlinale one of the most important events in the international film calendar: the filmmakers, actors, programmers, curators, industry promoters and fans, from rookies to veterans.

Dr. Elisa Jochum, head of the Deutsche Kinemathek Film Archive and lecturer at Film Academy Baden-Württemberg; Elisa Jochum is a film scholar and cultural historian. She previously worked and did research at the Goethe-Institut, Humboldt-University Berlin, University College London, and Yale University.

This is only my 2nd Berlinale, can you believe it? Film has been a determining factor of my entire adult life and yet, until 2022, a Berlinale visit had never happened for me. I started my job at the Deutsche Kinemathek only a few weeks before last year’s festival. Continue reading "#BerlinalePeople: Elisa Jochum, Deutsche..." »

Four years ago I sat in a Toronto restaurant at an intimate TIFF dinner with Angela Schanelec and Canadian indie musician Doug Tielli, whom she had discovered and liked after a year of searching for the right musician for her next project. At Berlinale 2023, Tielli was next to Schanelec again, at the Competition world premiere of Schanelec’s stark drama Music. The film is loosely based on the tragedy of Oedipus, where Oedipus/Jon (French-Quebec actor Aliocha Schneider) unwittingly murders a man, goes to jail, marries his jailer-bio mother, has a daughter and moves to Berlin as he goes blind. Continue reading "#Berlinale23: Music #review" »