Partisan fingers crossed for 107x Germany at Berlinale 2014. This is not the Berlinale of the Biggest German Names like the
auteur-heavy 2012 edition featuring Petzold+Dresen+Schmid+Glasner. Nor is it as paltry as 2013, with a lone and not so well-received
“Gold” by Thomas Arslan. This edition's German presence is noticeable and intriguing.
Let’s begin with the
Competition:
Not surprisingly but very excitingly included is writer-producer-director
Feo Aladag's war drama “Inbetween Worlds“ starring Ronald Zehrfeld (“Barbara”). Finally a feature film that looks at
Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and its moral dilemmas "in between" conscience and military orders, culture, religion and human allegiances.
TV and film director
Dominik Graf is no stranger to the Berlinale and has a home field advantage, let’s see what he can make of a historic love story. Graf has been working on the 1788 ménage à trois
"Beloved Sisters”, centred around famous German Sturm und Drang writer Friedrich Schiller. With a promising Florian Stetter (“Sophie Scholl”) as Schiller and Hannah Herzsprung (“Four Minutes”) and Henriette Confurius as said aristocratic sisters (plus Ronald Zehrfeld, see above), Berlinale head Dieter Kosslick is selling it as light, funny and sexy. The DoP just
won Best Cinematography for the film at the Bavarian Film Awards.
Promisingly
Dietrich Brüggemann —remember his lovely “Run If You Can”?— is back
with the intense sounding departure from his earlier comedic films, called
"Stations of the Cross”, announcing as its theme
“Catholicism gone crazy”. Co-written with his sister Anna, the film follows an all-consumingly religious 14-year-old girl. Kosslick just called it a "counterpart to Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac'". If it is half as good as Hans-Christian Schmid ‘s haunting 2006 “Requiem”, this is already a satisfying German Competition.
The biggest German surprise (apparently also to the programmers) and a late competition joiner:
Edward Berger, so far (barely) known as a TV crime director, goes straight to the Competition with
“Jack”, featuring two young boys searching Berlin for their mother. I hear only good things about the film, let the buzz begin.
Two years ago, we showed you
Maximilian Erlenwein's oft overlooked "Gravity" at the Goethe-Institut Toronto (the bank heist movie, not the recent 3D space extravaganza I just watched on a tiny airplane screen on my flight to Berlin). Now the Ophüls Award winner is reuniting a dream team: Moritz Bleibtreu (“Word War Z”) and Jürgen Vogel (“Mercy”) are the leads in his sophomore
stalker thriller “Stereo” in the Berlinale’s important Panorama sidebar. Erlenwein succinctly summarized the plot as “A man visits a man and doesn’t leave,” promising “violence, sex, humour, love and drama” along the way.
Other sections —naturally
Perspektive Deutsches Kino with 14 films— abound with galvanizing
German work. Just not work about Germany. A trend I have commented on before is the tendency of the next generation of German filmmakers to deal with anything but Germany. While many of our 40+ auteurs delve into German history and contend with the country’s present, the
debutants from Germany’s strong academies take flight to everywhere from Cuba to Kyrgyzstan. I will try to catch
Mirjam Lenze’s self-produced doc “Flowers of Freedom”, following Kyrgyz villagers fighting Canadian gold mine Kumtor over triggering an environmental disaster. The
Forum’s German films are interesting in that they feature a lot of international cross-over (see my comments on Australia’s “Lore” last year). First-time German director Anja Marquardt is presenting her English-language US production “She’s Lost Control”, while the German production “Los Ángeles” by Munich-trained American Damian John Harper is set along the US-Mexican border. With an overall increase in co-productions and thus multi-hyphenated films, I am just waiting for the abolition of any and all national markers in international festival catalogues.
The
Special sidebar honours Volker Schlöndorff among others, screening his new film
“Diplomacy” as well as a
restoration of his 44-year-old “Baal", which stars a dizzying cast with Fassbinder, von Trotta and Schygulla. Also in the Special section is the German-Austrian alpine Western "The Dark Valley” by Andreas Prochaska, which already took Best Director as well as Best actor for Tobias Moretti at the Bavarian Film Awards. And Wim Wenders in 3D. (And Martin Scorsese.)
Nobody does film restoration better than the Germans. A
glorious new 4K copy of the 1920 silent classic "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” will be accompanied by celebrated New York organist John Zorn, undoubtedly one of the hottest festival tickets (I will line up before dawn but am not hopeful). The German highlights of the experimental art-meets-film-meets-art
Forum Expanded are too many to do justice here:
Heinz Emigholz premieres another flight across the world of architecture; video artist
Clemens von Wedemeyer presents his installation “Afterimage”;
Berlin’s Omer Fast has a new film. Finally, just so I can name half of the 1970s New German Cinema in one sentence: Rosa von Praunheim- and Werner Schroeter-camerawoman
Elfi Mikesch is back with her film “Fever”, starring Fassbinder- and Herzog-favourite Eva Mattes and Berliner Ensemble’s Martin Wuttke.
Overall, I am counting
an interesting number of second films this year by 30/40-something ones-to-watch (Aladag, Berger, Erlenwein, Metz, Kudelka, Llosa…). Which gives us a taste of the future as these filmmakers mature. Strategic of course, as Kosslick told the Berliner Morgenpost,
“The Competition would be skewed if too many big films didn't leave room for discoveries. We have to use the Competition to build our future too. This year, we have three debuts. Not every Competition film has to have established names and a glamorous cast."
I said it at the beginning of the year, I will say it again: I foresee a good —if not Golden— German film vintage.
by Jutta Brendemuehl, Toronto
Film still: "Zwischen Welten", photo Björn Kommerell Independent Artists Filmproduktion
