German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

One of the highlights of TIFF 2012 was the German-Australian WWII drama LORE by Cate Shortland, a film adaptation of British author Rachel Seiffert's novella The Dark Room. LORE became the Australian Best Foreign Language Film entry to the Academy Awards 2013. On June 24, TIFF invites Seiffert to "Books on Film" as she examines, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel, the film version of her gripping survival story and bold examination of the legacy of Nazism and its horrors. Email us by noon EST Tuesday, June 18, for your chance to win 1 pair of tickets to the TIFF event. Only the winners will be notified.

Here is my article about LORE from seven years ago, looking at how the Australian director adapted a British book into a successful and popular German-language film:

TIFF 2012: Deutsch, ja bitte!

An Australian and two French directors are walking into a film studio … and they want to make films in German. Here’s an intriguing phenomenon in this year’s TIFF line-up: Films by international directors made in the German language. Continue reading "TIFF Books on Film: LORE" »

I've previously written about the 40th anniversary of Michael Ende's famous book-turned-film(s), The Neverending Story. The magical story also came with neverending (posthumous) headaches for the German children's author and his estate:

It is one of the great works of German children’s and youth literature. According to the publisher, Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, issued 40 years ago, has sold millions of copies. But who owns it?



Continue reading "40 years of "Neverending" Rights Issues" »

Before Harry Potter and Inkheart, there was the classic fantasy tale of Bastian Balthazar Bux, accompanied by creatures with peculiar names and a book that magically comes to life. 40 years ago, in 1979, German children’s book author Michael Ende (1929-1995) --the author of screen-adapted previous bestsellers MOMO and JIM BUTTON-- brought out The Neverending Story.

The book quickly entered the canon of classic children’s literature.The project's origin story has entered the realm of the mythical, nearly as colourful as the land Fantasia: Continue reading "40 years of The Neverending Story" »

Select media responses to the May 2019 GOETHE FILMS series "Past Forward: Directors before Cannes" featuring Berlin Komplizenfilm production house directors Maren Ade, Valeska Grisebach and Ulrich Köhler:

The Cannes Film Festival has a long and fabled history as a launch pad for world cinema’s most remarkable new talents. That certainly was the case for the filmmakers showcased in Past Forward: Directors Before Cannes, the Goethe-Institut’s new series of lesser seen features made by three German directors just before their bigger breakthroughs. It begins with Everyone Else, a finely nuanced relationship drama that earned some love for Maren Ade before her next feature Toni Erdmann slayed ’em at Cannes three years ago. The series continues with Ulrich Köhler and Valeska Grisebach.
— Jason Anderson, Toronto Star Continue reading "Praise for GOETHE FILMS Komplizenfilm retro" »

In 2008, Canada's Stratford Festival, the largest classical repertory theatre in North America, hosted its first foreign guest production, by Deutsches Theater Berlin, with the Goethe-Institut Toronto as arts partner. It was director Michael Thalheimer's radical and internationally celebrated adaptation of Lessing’s 1772 Emilia Galotti with Nina Hoss (PHOENIX) in the title role, in a play about a conflict of conscience at the court of an Italian prince.

For its 2019 season, Stratford has commissioned its own company production of Lessing’s other famous stage work: Nathan the Wise, in preview now and opening June 15. It was last seen on a major stage in English Canada 15 years ago at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre.

Just as with the much adapted classic Faust material, the cinematic history of Nathan --including censorship and reprisals-- is perhaps even more intriguing than the long and constant stage success of Lessing’s famous parable of love and humanity and equal rights.

Manfred Noa's 1922 adaptation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's 1779 play is one of the forgotten classics of German silent cinema. Continue reading "Nathan the Wise, from page to stage to screen" »

In the last entry, we highlighted our screening of Heinrich Carow's film Coming Out -- the first (and last) queer East German DEFA film, which literally premiered on the day the Wall came down. Another intriguing East-West German film story is "the time the West censored an East German film":

Heinrich Mann finished writing his now famous novel Der Untertan [Man of Straw] in 1914, but it wasn’t published in Germany until four years later. The First World War got in between. The book reaped vocal praise, but the critics were just as vocal. Decades later the novel was adapted for film by the DEFA, the East German film studio. Today, Wolfgang Staudte’s 1951 film adaptation The Kaiser’s Lackey is considered a masterpiece. But it was as controversial at that time as the book had been. The Cold War was to blame. Continue reading "The Time the West Censored an East German Film" »

With the support of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto is hosting the 12th Annual Toronto German Studies Symposium 2019 from May 22-24. This year's topic is "Reconsidering Feminism, Film Authorship & Performance". Organizer Prof. Angelica Fenner invited me to be on the panel on "Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Film Festivals, and Funding" alongside Jane Kim (TIFF), Skadi Loist (Konrad Wolf Film University Babelsberg), and filmmaker Ula Stöckl (Florida Central University), moderated by Hester Baer. In preparation, we had a conversation on bias, post-feminism, quotas, representation, subjectivity, complicity, access, equality, labels, marginalisation, solidarity, discovery, reinterpretation, barriers, successes, and role models:

Sometimes fiction and reality collide in the most unexpected ways. Like when you’re checking into a hotel in the West German city of Essen, near Dusseldorf, that sports a plaque that reads: "Handelshof, built in 1912-13 as a business hotel. First managed by the parents of actor Heinz Ruehmann, who was born in Essen. 1913 taken over by Otto Blau as a hotel and restaurant. After WWII destruction, rebuilt 1952-56." That hotel in 1913 had 250 rooms, a restaurant, a bakery, a cafe, offices, stores -- and a cinema. The site of the former medieval town wall gate has been heritage protected since 1985.

Continue reading "Grand Hotel, from Essen to Berlin to Hollywood" »

Reposting my review of Valeska Grisebach's Cannes & TIFF success WESTERN because it is another algorithm "If you liked this film --and I did--, you will like Grisebach's earlier BE MY STAR," which we are screening 1 night only on May 14 as part of our GOETHE FILMS series "Past Forward: Directors before Cannes."

At last year's Berlinale I was impressed with Aline Fischer, a young French-German filmmaker entering the microcosm of male Arab migrants in Berlin. Perhaps she took classes with Valeska Grisebach, who achieves the same feat with WESTERN, a woman artist uniquely illuminating a hermetic male ecosystem --here German construction workers in Bulgaria.

The women who appear in the film are as diverse as they are backgrounded: the caring elderly matriarch, the storekeeper who initially to refuses to serve the German, the village girl who scoffs at the construction worker's advances, the translator who becomes the object of desire.

"As a woman, I was interested in this closed male cosmos, where women are physically absent but in other ways incredibly present. They are constantly being talked about, being fantasized. On the one hand, there’s the desire for women, on the other a great and different intimacy among the men," Grisebach told Berlin's taz newspaper. Continue reading "#TIFF17 review: WESTERN - The Woman Who Stares..." »