Not a bad year for Sandra Hüller, who won Theatre Actress of the Year and the German Cross of Merit in 2020. GOETHE FILMS is back in real life at TIFF Bell Lightbox in October with a mid-career retrospective of one of Europe's most versatile actors. Program details here. Read my TIFF16 "Toni Erdmann" review to get in the mood!Ticket raffles tba!
GOETHE FILMS resume at TIFF Bell Lightbox with limited attendance, assigned seats, physically distanced and fully mask at all times for everyone's safety.
With the figures for the first half of 2020 in, the central German film funding body FFA presents the interim status of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the German film industry. After the attendance and sales results in January (10.6 million / €93.6 million) and February (10.1 million / €82.5 million) were on par with the previous year, from mid-March the industry experienced an unprecedented slump with cinema closings and production standstill due to the lockdown. From the middle of May, a few theatres opened under strict distancing and hygiene rules. Due to the required low occupancy rates, profitable operations were nearly impossible. In addition, the releases of many films were postponed. 
I remember reading an interview where an American journalist asked Sophia Loren how she manages to be beautiful. Slightly exasperated, she simply replied that you are beautiful or you are not. I was reminded of that when the CBC’s Matt Galloway asked Werner Herzog for his latest Hot Docs-supported #TIFF20 documentary premiere where the awe inherent in his work comes from and Herzog replied that it’s always been in him. In typical Herzog fashion, he goes on to talk about cataclysms, stardust, extraterrestrials, and atomic bombs.
In the hit TV series “4 Blocks” Moussa Sullaiman played the role of the nefarious clan chief Halim Karami. Now he wants to see where he can go as an actor. Who is this wandering player? 
MUBI has become one of the most intriguing international platforms for rotating, hand-picked global cinema, including a steady stream of German films such as Edgar Reitz' historical family epic "Heimat" or one of my favourite Berlin Wall films, Hans Stoehr's "Berlin is in Germany". On the occasion of MUBI's e-release of 
Giancarlo Rosi’s elegiac 2016 Berlinale Golden Bear winner Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) took us to the edge of Europe as its citizens were looking out over the ocean seeing people endanger their lives to land on their shores. His latest documentary Notturno, an Italian-French-German co-production composed out of two years of 90 hours of footage (shot by Rossi) from the borderland between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon is in a way a prequel and sequel to Fuocoammare, looking at the people who do not or cannot flee the war-torn and terrorized Middle East, who stayed and stay in their difficult, devastated, and brutalized homelands.
Frightened, filthy men and women are separated by gender and pushed onto buses, taunted, harassed, assaulted, herded off to certain death. This is not Nazi Germany in 1942.
Recent in-production news out of Germany and Europe has been fantastically heavy on female-led projects: Fingscheidt’s yet untitled Sandra Bullock-starrer; Harfouch’s “The Girl with the Golden Hands”; Stünkel’s “Nahschuss”; Nosbusch’s “Gift”; von Heinz’ new TV series “KaDeWe”; and Finsterwald's "Sisi" reinterpretation.
