During TIFF16 is before TIFF17, to adapt a famous German soccer adage.
If the directors below seem familiar, it's because you've seen them featured at TIFF over the years. What are they currently working on (and will we see them at TIFF17)?
After just catching the new Wenders and Herzog at TIFF, let's start our future projection with echoes of TIFF15: Actor
Burghardt Klaussner (FRITZ BAUER) was cutting his birthday cake at #TIFF15, and he is working again with highly prolific
director Lars Kraume on the
provocative and highly controversial TV experiment TERROR that will be accompanied by a TV audience debate. This fall he will fill another legal and ethical role alongside other
TIFF alumni like Lars Eidinger (in Maren Ade's EVERYONE ELSE), Martina Gedeck (THE LIVES OF OTHERS) and Florian David Fitz (TOUR DE FORCE).
Needless to say the public broadcaster didn't go for it.
Promising young director
Thomas Stuber, fresh off a much deserved German Film Award for A HEAVY HEART, a quiet TIFF15 success, is working on his next film IN DEN GAENGEN (In The Aisles).
The romantic drama reunites him with acclaimed author Clemens Meyer as co-author. After Christian (27) has lost his construction job, he stacks crates at a food terminal. In this pleasant enough but at times melancholically lonely work environment he meets the mysterious Marion and is compelled to find out her secret.
The screenplay already won this year’s German Screenplay Award. Stuber says that while he tries to capture universal themes and stories in his films, the locations they inhabit tend to be in and around Leipzig, home to both Stuber and Meyer, and A HEAVY HEART's memorable protagonist Herbert. Release date tba.
Christian Zübert brought TOUR DE FORCE to TIFF14. 2017 will see the release of the comedy LOMMBOCK, sequel to his popular 2001 movie LAMMBOCK. Moritz Bleibtreu (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) reprises his role as Kai, now with an Asian meal delivery service that doubles as a weed dealership. His friend Stefan lives in Dubai but has to visit Germany to take care of some business. Complications are inevitable because, as a line in LAMMBOCK went, the past sometimes hits you later.
Since her success with
HANNAH ARENDT (TIFF12), Margarethe von Trotta has been busy if not always lucky with the critics.
THE ODD COUPLE, ready next year, is a comedy and German-American co-production, and just like HANNAH ARENDT co-written with New York's Pamela Katz. Yes, it is a
female remake of the US film: Two very different women share an ex-husband and are forced to share a luxurious loft.
Starring Trotta regulars Katja Riemann (ROSENSTRASSE) and Barbara Sukowa.
Michael Haneke's next film is also supposed to come to a HAPPY END next year.
The classic, but perhaps most political Haneke plot to date reunites AMOUR's Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant, who portray a bourgeois family in Calais who do not take notice of the bigger world around them, with the refugee crisis just being one external factor seeping into the storyline. The French-US-German-Mexican co-production would make an obvious Cannes 2017
premiere and TIFF17 North American premiere.
Speaking of political work: If you saw
Marc Wiese's intense North Korea doc CAMP 14 at TIFF12, you will run to catch two projects he is about to finish: a documentary on modern slavery and another one on
six years of war in Syria.
Meanwhile, a number of German arthouse regulars are back and focussing on work and life.
Berlin School's Thomas Arslan (DEALER; GOLD) is shooting HELLE NAECHTE (Light Nights) with actor Georg Friedrich and Christoph Petzold's producer. Michael works as an engineer. His uneventful life is thrown off course when his father dies. Together with his son Luis he moves to Norway for a fresh start.
Valeska Grisebach, Maren Ade's script consultant on TONI ERDMANN at TIFF16, is in post-production for Austrian-German-Bulgarian co-pro WESTERN.
A group of German construction workers is on their way to work in Bulgaria, eager for adventure. Between curiosity and prejudice, they try to make contact with the nearby villagers. Friendships develop, despite some lingering initial lies, but also rivalries among the workers.
Ulrich Köhler (SLEEPING SICKNESS) is IN MY ROOM, a mystery drama that tells of Armin Jakob, in his forties, a freelancer with lots of time and little money. One morning the world looks the same as always, but mankind has disappeared and left him behind.
Philip Gröning gave us three hours of THE POLICE OFFICER'S WIFE at TIFF13. He will be back on screen with MY BROTHER ROBERT. Co-written with Swiss actress Sabine Timoteo (and already shot three years ago), Gröning calls his latest project "surreal". “A cross between a dream, a Western and a poetic lecture on philosophy, with elements from Heimatfilms and even splatter.“ The screenplay centres on a brother and sister, Robert and Elena, 19-year-old twins, who spend one summer weekend at a gas station in the countryside, cramming for Elena’s final philosophy exam.
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
promo image: TERROR photo ARD Degeto/RBB/Julia Terjung
