German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

Watching the Berlinale awards show, and the jury is in.

Betrayal, honour, crime. The Golden Bear for Best Film (surprisingly, out of the 18 contenders) goes to the Taviani brothers' film "Caesar must die", Italy's first main Berlinale award since 1991. The semi-documentary follows Roman prisoners while rehearsing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The media and most audiences (including me) had their money on the Hungarian Roma drama "Just The Wind" by Bence Fliegauf, which did win the coveted Jury Grand Prix Silver Bear as well as the Amnesty International Award and the Peace Film Prize.

Germany went home with several awards. Christian Petzold for Best Director, cinematographer Lutz Reitemeier won Outstanding Artistic Achievement for his work on the much-discussed Chinese historical drama "White Deer Plain". And one of my festival favourites, "This ain't California", was honoured by the independent jury of "Dialogue en perspective".

Canada did not go home empty either: The Silver Bear for Best Actress went to Congolese lay actor Rachel Mwanza --who jumped up and down in disbelief-- for her role of an African child soldier in Kim Nguyen's "Rebelle" -- which received special mention as having been in the running for the Golden Bear. The DAAD Short Film Prize went to "The Man that Got Away" by Trevor Anderson.

Congratulations, and see you in Berlin next year.


by Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Some observations on the last-but-one day of the festival, after having seen two dozen or so films, mostly new German arthouse features...

1. Many German films look inside, at family, relationship, the self.

2. Most German films (while made by largely Berlin-based creators) aren't set in Berlin -- or any other big city for that matter.

3. German cinematographers love nature, landscape, the forest. "Nature takes back the set," Christian Petzold said in a Goethe-Institut discussion today about his Competition film.

4. Germany's best stage actors are translating well onto the screen.

5. We saw the debuts of a promising next generation of very young actors.

6. Directing is still an exclusively male domain (plus Doris Doerrie).

7. Certain themes or tropes pop up again and again: Happiness & guilt, often intertwined -- criminal and moral guilt & the attempt to find love again in "Mercy", social and individual debt & seeing love when it comes along in "Barbara", familial guilt and responsibility & saving our most important relationships in Hans-Christian Schmid's "Was bleibt" ("Home for the Weekend"). Mental illness (depression, male anorexia, suicide attempts). And secrets everywhere.


The revolution is happening outside this year, as German president Christian Wulff steps down amid scandal on day 9 of the Berlinale (many filmmakers had refused to follow the official invite to his Berlinale reception in protest of various financial scandals). Let's see whether the German films at the Berlinale 2013 will reflect the outside world more directly.


P.S. The photo shows the psychedelic ceiling of Berlin's best cinema, the International on Karl-Marx-Allee.


by Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

"I am not that person," says refreshingly earthy actor Birgit Minichmayr (worth another Bear?) in Matthias Glasner's intense drama Mercy, his sixth feature. A "good" person, she fights tooth and nail being defined by one accident, one bad decision. One that could have happened to every one of us, which keeps a stranglehold on the audience and throws basic Who Am I and What Now questions in our faces.

Maria's very deed negates her tough job as a hospice nurse and throws everyone around her into turmoil: her "arsehole" husband, who seemingly to his own surprise becomes the moral compass in the dark (a great role for well-known actor Juergen Vogel); their struggling and taciturn teenage son (strangely neglected by both parents in their sorrow and preoccupations); the husband's desperate lover. The setting in the remote, bitter cold but stunningly beautiful Norwegian polar night could have been kitschy but is simply hypnotising and seductive, with beautiful camera shots around the few lights. Up to the glorious final celebration. There is not just guilt, there is hope for mercy.


by Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Rare and unique footage from the 1980s GDR youth underground culture mixed with lovingly animated scenes of three boys' friendship (a little graphic novel in itself), the tragic story of a reluctant athlete, a crazy but vulnerable protagonist, a great soundtrack ... it is hard to list all the convincing elements in this authentic documentary of the East Berlin "rollerboarding" scene (as skateboarding was called in the GDR so as to stand out from the capitalist American fad). The deeply sad and very touching film follows Denis aka Panik, born 1970, and his friends as they create a new subculture as a way to live with the "concrete playground" that was their daily GDR. The movement goes viral fast and attracts young people across the country as they start to tour. It is nearly surprising that the Stasi doesn't get to them until just before the fall of the Wall. The state had initially tried to co-opt them into the official sports system, without success. In a way they were practicing for a revolution they didn't see coming, with different means.

The film is full of surprises, nothing is black and white. The immense and today nearly unimaginable freedom these kids had (taking off as young teens on skateboard trips to the coast), the Euroskate '88 championship in Prague that brought the East and West scenes together, the 24-hour party life they lived in an apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee ... The audience, whether familiar with the scene or not, feels like taking part in their own high school reunion when the old crew gets together. This sure ain't California, and no-one wants it to be anything other than what it is.

In 2011, Denis is killed in Afghanistan, where he served as a Bundeswehr soldier of the reunited Germany. "Do you really want to live forever .... Forever young..." is the closing song of the film.


by Jutta Brendemuehl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

P.S. The photo shows the bottom ramp of the Berlin TV tower on Alexanderplatz where the crew used to perform. I took it a few hours after seeing the film, on my way back to the hotel (which also appeared in the film, in its previous socialist incarnation as Hotel Stadt Berlin). As I walk across the square now, I keep looking around, expecting Denis to jump off a ledge to do one of his outrageous stunts.

1980 in an East German provincial town. "I could come over and live with you here. We could be happy here," the West German lover of East German doctor Barbara, who wants to leave the GDR, muses during a secret rendez-vous. She sits up abruptly. "Are you crazy? One cannot be happy here." The entire film by Christian Petzold (whose script shines with beautiful dialogues) revolves around this scene.

Much lauded stage and film actor Nina Hoss (we had her onstage at the Stratford Festival in 2008) plays her favourite role, a volcano, cool and rough on the outside, seething and emotional on the inside. It is her 5th film with Petzold; for "Yella" she received the Silver Bear at the Berlinale five years ago.

There are moments where the film threatens to slip. Do we need to see the evil Stasi officer's dying wife to understand we're all human? The subplot of the two "difficult" youths in Barbara's hospital seems functional at times, not given the credit it is due, mainly there to force Barbara's not-so-surprising final decision. The film's beauty lies in the subdued romanticism of the tender nearly-not love story between her and her new colleague Andre. See actor Ronald Zehrfeld in his more typical role of a hard-boiled cop fighting the Russian mafia in Berlin in our upcoming GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox series "In the Face of Crime" in May.
Continue reading "Live from the Berlinale, day 5: Petzold's Barbara" »

As he mentioned at last year's TIFF world premiere of Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog follows up on his investigation of convicted murderers in US prisons only half a year later. Technically not a German film but very much one by way of the author and his distinct handwriting, "Death Row" delves (for three hours) into the world of five inmates, starting and ending with the worst.

The less poetic title of this second engagement proves to be programmatic: less environment and context (no death row groupies, no chaplains), less of Herzog himself --although you won't have to go without his leading questions or his hypnotic interpretative voiceover--, more haunting perhaps, focused on the characters. Simpler. More straight-forward. It actually consists of four filmic portraits of 47min each, structural mirrors down to a powerful identical opening scene that pans the execution area of a "death house". The self-imposed sonnet corset befits the overly structured lives on death row. At times it feels like profiler pieces, with all the suspense of the study of the criminal mind. "You will have to endure it", Herzog warns us about his formal choices before the screening.

But then there are a lot of laughs throughout the film. One revealing the essence of Herzog: "I saw God once," one inmate reports when Herzog asks him about his dreams. Herzog immediately gets highly excited: "Please, describe this to me in more detail!"

Herzog the instinctive dramaturge and expert schemer --he calls his film "subversive" in the Q&A-- makes sure that some of his points of view come across crystal clear. Admonished by a DA not to humanize the murderer, he replies: "I don't humanize the inmate. She is human. The crimes are monstrous, they are not monsters." (The DA wiggles her head in doubt.)

I am sure we will see the film(s) in Canada shortly (and both should be seen together as they are complementary). If not Herzog, who said he might be too busy making more films when I asked him whether he might attend a Toronto festival in the spring or fall. But you can look forward to a potential future feature on the (nearly-too-good-not-to-be-a-script) prison break storyline embedded in "Death Row". It's been 55 years in the making for the auteur, who turns 70 later this year: He lets us in on having wanted to do a film about a Munich high-security prison when he was a teen back in Bavaria. That's the power and stamina of Werner Herzog.


P.S. On a Canadian Berlinale note: Later that night an equally adoring crowd gathered around Guy Maddin for his world premiere of "Keyhole", a gangster ghost house story with Udo Kier, who I have seen shine in three extravagant international arthouse films (one being "Melancholia") in the past five months. And the Maddin-Kier team is about to start shooting an online film project of 100 days of seances around the world channeling lost films, starting in Paris next week.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

I saw not a film. Which is not to say that is wasn't interesting. Well-known director Romuald Karmakar showed one and a half hours of one-shot archival footage (taped by German television) of nearly a dozen academics, thinkers, artists presenting talks at last December's conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on "Angriff auf die Demokratie - Eine Intervention" ("Attack on Democracy - An Intervention"). All you see is the fairly static perspective of changing speakers at a lecturn. While one can't help but wonder a) why this "montage" as Karmakar calls it was chosen for the film festival (other than for obvious political reasons) and b) whether it might better be presented as an interactive online project or a book, the "film" strangely works on some medial level -- if only because one has no choice but to actually listen. Karmakar was quoted in the press as saying that he consciously didn't edit to leave audiences exposed to all arguments brought forth by the illustrious group. And the barrage of highly critical thought --journalist Nils Minkmar gleefully describing the politician as a design product; author Ingo Schulze flatly declaring a state of post-democracy; another arts journalist advising to question the governance of rating agencies and pretty much every other agency-- does leave one with a feeling of a congregation of a critical mass of dissent and protest, a sort of intellectual Occupy event.

Six minutes of it actually were film in the usual sense of the word: Karmakar, himself part of the conference, delivered a short doc as a metaphor on patterns in stock exchange movements. The film shows a herd of goats on a meadow.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Great exchange today with the quite brilliant and very entertaining and engaging Rainer Rother, Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek and Director of the Berlinale's Retrospective program as well as member of the selection committee for the Competition ("not a best-of show of good films", he immediately dispels any misconceptions).

The veteran programmer was tasked to reveal to our small group of international Goethe programmers what makes a good film in his books. Instead of answers, we got a tool kit of questions to hit the cinemas from Kabul to Rio with: What stayed with you? What made you think? What struck you as the filmic uniqueness? Is the film hitting a nerve, does it challenge, provoke debate? And, paramount, does it take risks?

Rother's (provocative) summation: A bad film can be a good film. His personal example was Terence Mallick's Tree of Life, which he declared his favourite film of 2011 -- despite weeping dinosaur interludes. Or: Rather fail in a new, fresh manner than succeed in the same old ways. "The masterwork only exists among kitsch and trash."

by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

As I am sitting in the opening ceremonies, I immediately remember what makes the Berlinale unique on the festival circuit: pure, unadulterated politics. Here's a culture minister who doesn't mince words in his greeting when talking about Syria or reprimanding China for its human rights violations or Iran for persecuting its filmmakers. And the Berlinale at least tries not only to talk the talk but walk the walk: He is followed on stage by A Separation director and jury member Asghar Farhadi, who won last year's festival, launching his remarkable film around the world. Ironically, I nearly didn't make it to the cinema in time because my bus had to take a detour due to a demonstration on Potsdamer Platz. The fight certainly continues in Berlin.

And this festival opens on a revolutionary note as well. The world premiere of Les adieux à la reine, with an impressively mature and coolly smart (plus fluently French) Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette, looks at the last days of the ancien regime from the perspective of her household and does afford interesting insights.

P.S. You have to trust me when I tell you that the photo shows Kruger walking the red carpet up to the Berlinale Palast (from my perspective and that of hundreds of fans).

P.P.S.: Shah Rukh Khan update: Festival director Dieter Kosslick appeased the masses, saying that Khan, who had tweeted yesterday that a fever might keep him away from his Don premiere, was now coming to the festival on Saturday after all to present his latest action film -- shot in Berlin.


by Jutta Brendemuhl, Goethe-Institut Toronto

Starting the Berlinale today ... not in Berlin, but in Potsdam. Studio Babelsberg is celebrating its 100th anniversary at the Berlinale with several exhibitions and a best-of retro. If you've seen a Fritz Lang or F.W. Murnau film --or Inglourious Basterds or Anonymus for that matter--, you've seen Studio Babelsberg, Germany's dream factory. It has persevered through the empire and WWI, the Weimar Republic (back then as famous Ufa), the control of the Nazi's "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" and WWII, the GDR (as DEFA) and now the globalised capitalism of a united Germany.

A highlight is the new presentation this Sunday (to the day 100 years after its premiere) of the first film ever made at Babelsberg, Der Totentanz (released in English as The Dance to Death or The Death Song) with early diva Asta Nielsen. At Filmmuseum Potsdam, silent film expert and head of the Filmmuseum Munich Stefan Droessler, who restored the film from a badly damaged Russian nitrate copy to 34 minutes, half of its original glory, showed us a pre-premiere copy of the risque and murderous love triangle (too risque for American audiences, it turned out when it was released in 1912). The silent "mime drama", as it was billed, in its best moments impresses with complex scene structures and indirect shots -- and the mesmerizing seductress Nielsen.

Your next chance to see Studio Babelsberg: Tom Tykwer just finished shooting his film Der Wolkenatlas (Cloud Atlas) with Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon.


by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto