Our fall/winter film series features four nights celebrating the best young German actors of the European “Shooting Stars” Awards at the Berlinale with a double feature each.Each year, European Film Promotion EFP presents the most talented young actors from across Europe. Among those are such names as Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Moritz Bleibtreu, and Nina Hoss. Since the program began in 1998, 17 German actors have been honoured, among the younger ones our four featured artists: August Diehl (2000), Maria Simon (2004), Hannah Herzsprung (2008), and Alexander Fehling (2011), who was just at the Goethe-Institut Toronto for a Director’s Talk during the Toronto International Film Festival 2011 (see below).
All of them are connected in their work. Herzsprung and Diehl both addressed Germany's left-wing RAF terrorism and its roots: she in The Baader Meinhof Complex –our contribution to the European Film Festival Toronto 2009--, he in If Not Us, Who?, which we will present as a Canadian premiere in January 2012; Fehling and Diehl recently starred together in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds as well as Heinrich Breloer's The Buddenbrooks (and soon together again in Niemandsland, an east-west drama set on the Baltic coast in the 1980s). You will see Diehl and Simon together in Nothing But Ghosts in our series; and Fehling, Diehl and Simon have all worked with master director Hans-Christian Schmid (23, Distant Lights, Storm --which was our contribution at the European Union Film Festival Toronto 2010).
Don't miss the best young German actors on screen now:
October 31: Hannah Herzsprung (Four Minutes; Life Actually)
November 1: Alexander Fehling (Goethe!; And Along Come Tourists)
January 25: August Diehl (If Not Us, Who?; 23)
January 26: Maria Simon (Distant Lights; Nothing But Ghosts)
All 6:30 pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Watch this space for portraits on each of our Shooting Stars!
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
