Last but not least in our 4-part GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Bell Lightbox series on Europe's "Shooting Stars" is the talented Maria Simon.Since the 2003 international blockbuster Good Bye Lenin!, in which Simon played protagonist Daniel Brühl’s sister, the film and TV actor has been known to millions. Born in 1976 in Leipzig, she joined her father, who worked at the UN, in New York in 1990. Back in Berlin, like so many of her stellar colleagues, she joined the Ernst Busch Academy of Performing Arts to become an actor.
Her breakthrough came with Judith Kennel’s Zornige Küsse, for which she received the Best Actress Awards of the Moscow International Film Festival 2000. Similarly, her role in Isabelle Stever’s Erste Ehe was acknowledged with the 2003 Max Ophüls Prize as best newcomer. Then came Wolfgang Becker‘s tragicomedy Good Bye Lenin! and the European Shooting Star Award (just as she was on the stage of the famous Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin in Bertolt Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper).
While having three children with actor-husband Bernd Michael Lade (which whom she also has a punk band, Ret Marut), she has spent a lot of time on German TV screens, with a respected Adolf Grimme Award nomination 2005. If you are a fan of German’s seminal crime dramas –(former West Germany’s) Tatort and (former East Germany’s) Polizeiruf 110: Maria Simon now shines regularly as the new taciturn and stubborn detective in the Polizeiruf set in the eastern town of Brandenburg, after already playing detectives in the TV thrillers Kongo and Tod in der Eifel.
Revisit Goodbye, Lenin! in this (German) trailer —with Maria Simon & Daniel Brühl sharing the first scene— and this US trailer.
Thursday, January 26, double bill:
Distant Lights (D 2003, 105 min, 35mm), directed by Hans-Christian Schmid
"The laconic episodic drama belongs to the best German cinema has to offer." (Cinema)
The river Oder between Poland and Germany is a magnet for people from all walks of life on their journey towards a better life. A place where a hapless businessman loses everything he owns but gains something more important, where a teen-aged cigarette smuggler defies his father and brother to free the girl he loves from a detention centre, where an interpreter risks her career and her freedom to help an illegal refugee and where an architect meets his former girlfriend and discovers that they've both changed too much to find common ground for a new start.
Also starring our other "Shooting Star" August Diehl. German Film Award, Bavarian Film Award, FIPRESCI Award, German Film Critics' Award.
Watch the (German) trailer.
Nothing But Ghosts (D 2007, 116 min), directed by Martin Gypkens
"Hardly ever was a generation's attitude towards life captured more unobtrusively." (Spiegel)
Five tales of unfulfilled love, hopes and dreams, based on Judith Herrmann's famous short story collection. Whether they're in Venice, Jamaica, Berlin, the Nevadan desert or Iceland – the characters always leave their familiar surroundings behind. They travel to various countries for various motives, but they all inevitably realize that no matter where you go, you can't escape yourself. Festivals: Berlin, Shanghai, Locarno.
Watch the (German) trailer.
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 and DigiBeta
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
