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
