Summer is upon us, and as much as I love it, it sure ain’t the best of times for new arthouse films. So, fast forward with a look at noteworthy German films in production/coming soon that we will get to see over the next months and 2014. As I was writing this, the list got so long that I will have to split it in half and
continue next Friday with The Great German Directors.
Let's start on the soft side of arthouse: In 11th century Persia, a surgeon’s apprentice disguises himself as a Jew in order to study at a school that does not admit Christians. If this sounds familiar, you have probably read Noah Gordon’s books. In April I was lucky to attend the premiere of
filmmaker Philipp Stölzl directing Wagner’s Dutchman at the Staatsoper Berlin, where a critic mentioned that Stölzl (YOUNG GOETHE IN LOVE, which we showed at last year’s GOETHE FILMS to a full house) was just finishing
THE PHYSICIAN (Der Medicus) -- starring Ben Kingsley, Stellan Skarsgård and one of Germany’s new shooting stars, Elyas M’Barek (TURKISH FOR BEGINNERS). The lavish, 2-hour+ UFA production --entirely financed with German money, 26m Euros of it to be exact-- and shot at Germany’s Castle Querfurt and in Marokko, opens this Christmas. (
trailer)
< more in following entry on German Films @ TIFF 2013 to be posted on August 13!>
What attracted Stölzl to this literary adaptation was that it “wasn’t just a great adventure novel and an astounding panorama of medieval medicine; the book dealt with life’s big topics, religion as a mental prison, our difficult relationship with death, and last but not least the ‘culture clash’ between orient and occident. All still relevant today.“ Stölzl is currently dipping his toes into Hollywood – you can catch his action thriller ERASED (aka THE EXPATRIATE), starring Aaron Eckhart, in theatres right now. It’s claim to fame is that it was among the 10 most pirated movies online globally, a rare honour.
Apropos Elyas M´Barek: How could we at the Goethe not be excited about his upcoming comedy FACK JU GÖTHE by TURKISH FOR BEGINNERS head Bora Dagtekin: M´Barek will play a young criminal pretending to be a school janitor in order to get at his loot. But then he is mistaken for a substitute teacher and put in charge of a "high priority" class. "Multikulti" with an edge, can't wait.
Back to foreign lands (which German filmmakers lovelovelove), Oscar winner Caroline Link (NOWHERE IN AFRICA) stayed in Africa with her long-awaited new film EXIT MARRAKECH (see photo of her filming), which will open the Munich Film Festival next week. She also made this film with a quarter of Stölzl's money btw. In it, troubled teenager Ben unintentionally confronts his father Heinrich (Ulrich Tukur of THE LIVES OF OTHERS; THE WHITE RIBBON), a successful German theatre director staging a play in Marrakech. After a falling out with his estranged father, Ben loses himself in the shadowy Medina and sleazy nightclubs of the city, meets feisty Berber girl Karima and follows her to her hometown, far beyond the city and across unfamiliar and barren land. Also starring Josef Bierbichler (THE WHITE RIBBON; A YEAR AGO IN WINTER).
Speaking of Bierbichler, just announced: The brilliant character actor is moving up to President of a major soccer team. In LANDAUER by Hans Steinbichler (WINTER JOURNEY), Bierbichler will portray the life and work of Kurt Landauer, a Jew who was president of Germany’s biggest and best known soccer club FC Bayern München in 1913/1914, from 1919 to 1933 and again from 1947 to 1951. The story is news to me (and makes me like the new European Champions slightly more); likely news to most of Germany. It is astounding that these fresh Jewish-German stories are still out there to be discovered in 2013. Release date tba.
Director Sönke Wortmann (THE MIRACLE OF BERN) on the other hand is moving on from soccer themes to … well ... porn, some might say. He is tackling author and former German music TV talk show host Charlotte Roche’s notorious semi-autobiographical bestseller "Schoßgebete" as the aptly titled WRECKED. Elizabeth, in her early 30s, lives with Georg, 55 and daughter Liza, 9, leading a normal bourgeois life. But Elizabeth suffers from PTS: on her way to her wedding 10 years earlier, her three brothers died in a car crash. Since then she has been haunted by a mania to control everything around her and has developed death fantasies that she tries to deal with by having sex. Let’s see whether this will be Germany’s “50 Shades of Grey” --also in the works as a UK film I hear-- when it’s released on October 3, 2013 (Day of German National Unity, I assume coincidentally). Good cast: Lavinia Wilson, Jürgen Vogel and Juliane Köhler (AIMEE & JAGUAR). If you can't wait that long for Roche: David Wnendt (KRIEGERIN/COMBAT GIRLS) will preempt her second novel adaptation with his film version of her first hit FEUCHTGEBIETE (WETLANDS... you get the drift), in theatres 22 August, with Meret Becker and Axel Milberg as the unfortunate parents of a wild teen. Youtube does think it's adult content, so you have to register to see the trailer, while some German sites show it unrestricted.
We have 3x actor Devid Striesow (of Tom Tykwer’s THREE) to look forward to, apparently his lucky number: ALLES AUßER KONTROLLE by Johannes Naber, to be released later this year, is a black comedy that centres on three business consultants travelling around the globe and sealing their deals from uniform air-conditioned hotel rooms of the same hotel chain. A film that would make a great continuation of our GOETHE FILMS series on “Culture+Economy”.
Alongside Axel Prahl (WILLENBROCK) and Robert Stadlober (you would have just seen him in CRAZY at our GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox), Striesow will be on screen next year with THE BURROW (Der Bau) by Jochen Alexander Freydank, based on an unfinished novel by Franz Kafka. Never before adapted for the big screen, THE BURROW promises to be pure Kafka, a story of disassociation, fears and loneliness and cocooning in our time. Writer-director Freydank is not only a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he is also an Academy Award winner, memorably taking the Oscar for his 2009 short film TOYLAND which he produced, directed and co-wrote. “It will be a cool, modern and tough film – and not one moving through the visual world one would expect with this dark Kafka material,“ Freydank predicts. “We will add a clear and surprising ending that goes far beyond what Kafka set in his unfinished story.” Playing the lead role is Prahl, one of Germany’s most popular actors and the country’s best known TV detective. You might remember him as the lead in Andreas Dresen's wonderful film WILLENBROCK, which we showed at the Goethe-Institut Toronto in 2006.
Another project I am very curious about is Burhan Qurbani’s WIR SIND JUNG. WIR SIND STARK ("We are Young, We are Strong", release date tba). The film recounts the incidents of August 24, 1992 when, in the eastern German city of Rostock, a rampaging mob, to the applause and cheering of more than 3000 bystanders, besieged and set fire to a residential building holding, among others, more than 120 Vietnamese men, women and children. An event I unfortunately remember vividly. Starring Striesow and “Shooting Star” Saskia Rosendahl (LORE).
Until then you can enjoy Devid Striesow in his bizarre new Vespa-riding role as, yes … TATORT TV detective. A new job he shares with the best of German film and stage, like the above-mentioned Prahl; Joachim Krol (who sadly just quit the gig); Til Schweiger (who sadly just started); the refreshingly grumpy Martin Wuttke of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble; and in the past, mythically, Götz George, see previous blog post on Romuald Karmakar.
Striesow is only topped in the "busy" category by Daniel César Martín Brühl González Domingo aka Daniel Brühl* (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS), who has six international films in the works. Not bad for a young man from Cologne. Excuse the digression into largely non-German film but German-themed film, it is exciting:
The Spanish comedy NIT D’ESTIU is out (Brühl is trilingual German-Spanish-Catalan), and Brühl is about to star as racing legend Niki Lauda in Ron Howard’s RUSH* with Chris Hemsworth and Olivia Wilde. The biography of the mythical Austrian Formula 1 champion driver focusses on his 1976 crash that almost claimed his life and made his ears as famous as van Gogh’s. Mere weeks after the accident, he got behind the wheel to challenge his rival. Out 20 September. Closely followed by Bill Condon’s THE FIFTH ESTATE*, in which Brühl plays WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, based on Domscheidt’s Assange book. Out 11 October.
The most star-studded affair: A MOST WANTED MAN by Anton Corbijn after a le Carre thriller, with Rachel McAdams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Willem Dafoe (ever so commanding on stage in The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic in Toronto last week). I think one can safely predict that the film will garner some attention beyond the impressive cast – the plot centering around Chechen Muslims in Hamburg and the “war on terror”. Out 22 November.
Reunited with GOOD BYE, LENIN!’s Wolfgang Becker, Brühl will portray young journalist Sebastian Zöllner, who is writing an article on artist Manuel Kaminski in ME AND KAMINSKI, based on Daniel Kehlmann’s ("Measuring the World", adapted for the screen last year) bestselling decade-old novel. Zöllner hopes that Kaminski dies soon, so that he can cash in on his article. Finally, in SILS MARIA by writer-director Olivier Assayas (CARLOS), loosely announced for next year, Brühl will appear alongside Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche in 2014.
Looks like Daniel Brühl has a good chance at again outdoing Will Smith in setting a new world record for most public appearances on the red carpet in 12 hours (which he managed in 2006 by appearing in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Cologne).
As a teaser for next week's continuation on films in productions, we have 1 DVD of Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE to raffle, in the impressively restored HD-plus-extras Criterion edition. Email jutta.brendemuehl@toronto.goethe.org for a chance to win. (Only the winner will be contacted by June 28.)
by Jutta Brendemühl
