The latest German actor to be honoured by the Shooting Star is Alexander Fehling, who received the award at this year's Berlinale.A graduate from East Berlin's prestigious Ernst Busch School for the Performing Arts, 30-year old Fehling goes back and forth between the stage, where he has worked with legendary director Peter Stein in Schiller's Wallenstein, and the screen, where he moves between small "young" films (13 Semesters) and international big-budget films (Inglorious Basterds) -- and highly successful in all of these contexts. About his work with Tarantino he said in German Films Quarterly: "Quentin was just very interested in everyone who was coming into the room. It wasn't about what I had been doing before or what I know, but what I was doing at this particular point in time and in this room... I've always been interested in working on 'unsafe' terrain, and acting in another language means that I am discovering new things."
He was at TIFF this year, and the Goethe-Institut Toronto, presenting the film The River Used to be a Man, which he co-created with director-friend Jan Zabeil and largely improvised from a short expose (see below).
This November, we are showing Fehling in two leading roles that could not be more different: First in his latest German popular hit film Goethe!, where he portrays Germany's most famous poet/writer/scientist/philosopher and all-round renaissance man Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his turbulent youth (alongside another Shooting Star, Moritz Bleibtreu in an unusual role as Kestner). Director Stölzl said about casting Alexander: "He was the first candidate to show up, and I knew after a minute that he's our lead actor. He can play the comical moments as well as the tragic ones, he has an unbelievable palette."
Fast paced and romantic, as befits a hero of the Sturm and Drang era, Fehling runs and loves and provokes and kisses, fully throwing himself into the character of the young rebel and mesmerizing audiences. "With his leading-man looks and seductive charm, a skillful, versatile actor with great cross-over potential." The Shooting Star jury's comment on Fehling holds true, from Goethe! to his portrayal of terrorist RAF head Andreas Baader in If Not Us, Who? (in our series in January 2012, alongside Diehl and Bleibtreu).
Already, his first leading role in the acclaimed feature And Along Come Tourists (where he walked in last in the audition process) had rightly taken him to Cannes in 2007. The quiet and disoriented Sven, just out of school and starting his civilian service in the place of German army duty --Fehling himself did civilian service, in a psychiatric clini,-- finds himself in and confronted with Auschwitz, where he stumbles, struggles and learns to persevere. "It took a long time before the interesting things came along, but I had to be patient because I feel a certain sense of responsibility when I am playing a part," Fehling says about this time in his career (German Films Quarterly).
Tuesday, November 1, double bill:
Canadian premiere!: Goethe! (aka Young Goethe In Love, D 2010, 100 min), directed by Philipp Stölzl.
Germany, 1772 -- The young and boisterous Johann Goethe (Fehling) is sent by his father to a sleepy little town to mend his ways after failing his law exams. At first, he tries to do his best at the Supreme Court and even convinces his superior Kestner. But then Lotte enters his life and nothing is the same after they fall in love. However, Johann is unaware that Lotte is in fact already engaged to Kestner. German Film Award.
Watch the trailer (with English subtitles).
And Along Come Tourists (D 2007, 85 min), directed by Robert Thalheim.
Auschwitz wasn't what Sven (Fehling), a young German, had in mind when he signed up to do his civilian service abroad. For him, Auschwitz is a small town in Poland, a strange language, a concentration camp, all the musty grayness of high-school German history classes. To make matters worse, he's got to care for an unpleasant old man, Stanislaw Krzemilski, a former inmate who never left the camp and now spends his time either giving contemporary-witness lectures or repairing suitcases. As the weeks go by, Sven begins to discover both Auschwitz and Oswiecim, the place of horror and the Polish town, the memorial to inhumanity and the tourist industry that has sprung up around it. VGF Producers' Award.
6:30pm (doors open 6:10pm); Cinema 4, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto
Tickets $10 per night, $5 for ACTRA members; day-of at the TIFF Box Office
Open to audiences 18+
with English subtitles; 35mm
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
