Entries by Goethe-Institut Toronto

Spinning off of our #BerlinalePeople series, #GoetheTO is presenting a special edition of mini profiles of media industry influencers related to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which hosts Canada as a guest country of honour in 2020 and 2021. Meet the President and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair; the initiator of international partnerships and coordinator of the Frankfurt Book Fair's Book-to-Film activities at the Berlinale and Cannes; and the head of the Advisory Board Film @ Book Fair and Director of the DFF - Deutsches (German) Film Institute & Film Museum in Frankfurt.

Name & role: Niki Théron, Senior Manager International Projects at Frankfurter Buchmesse. Coordinator of Frankfurter Buchmesse “Book-to-Film” activities. Jury member Books at Berlinale 2022. Board member ENLIT – European Network for Literary Translation. In charge of the Frankfurt Fellowship Programme.

Dear Niki, picking out just one of the many film-related initiatives you oversee, tell us what a "Film Networking Day" looks like at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where you have hosted influential producers and directors from Quirin Berg (of Oscar winner The Lives of Others) to Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave). Continue reading "#Books-On-Film: Niki Théron, International..." »

If you liked the documentary I Am Greta or for that matter Toronto playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Dusseldorf and Toronto stage show Is My Microphone on? (a play in the form of a protest song by a dozen German and Canadian teens), make sure to watch Dear Future Children, in cinemas now.

The celebrated German-UK-Austrian documentary explores how three young women, in Hong Kong, Chile and Uganda, cope with the staggering personal impact of their political activism. A film about the next generation, made by the next generation. Continue reading "#Doc Next: Dear Future Children (& win tix)" »

Spinning off of our #BerlinalePeople series, #GoetheTO is presenting a special edition of mini profiles of media industry influencers related to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which hosts Canada as a guest country of honour in 2020 and 2021. Meet the President and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair; the initiator of international partnerships and coordinator of the Frankfurt Book Fair's Book-to-Film activities at the Berlinale and Cannes; and the head of the Advisory Board Film @ Book Fair and Director of the DFF - Deutsches (German) Film Institute & Film Museum in Frankfurt.

Name & role: Juergen Boos, President and CEO of Frankfurt Book Fair since 2005. President of LITPROM (Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature). Member of German Book Prize Academy and the Scientific Committee of Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Continue reading "#Books-On-Film: Juergen Boos, President..." »

Free Canada-wide now at Toronto.Goethe-on-Demand.de
with English subtitles

Presented by the Goethe-Institut Toronto
with the McLuhan Centre for Culture & Technology

From duck face to our continuously mirrored Zoom faces, from “accept all cookies” to compulsive oversharing on social media, our relationship with our digital data selves has, for better or worse, transgressed and dissolved the boundaries between public and private. Three recent German films reveal varied expressions of exposure and tell captivating e-stories around enigmatic, intriguing and perhaps familiar characters. Thinkers from Toronto’s McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology give us their take on the shifting mediated faultlines around our splintered identities.

Searching Eva - documentary by Pia Hellenthal, Germany 2019 Continue reading ""Exposure: Our Social (Media) Lives"..." »

Buy tickets for Transit (GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox, Oct 14 only)

The autobiography of Georg K. Glaser contains a wonderful sentence: “Suddenly, as my flight came to an end, I found myself surrounded by something I termed ‘historical silence.’” Georg K. Glaser was a German communist during the time in which the novel “Transit” by Anna Seghers was set. He fled to France and then to its unoccupied “free zone,” or “zone libre,” to
which Marseille belonged.

Historical silence is akin to windlessness or still air: the breeze ceases to propel the sailboat, which is enveloped by the vast nothingness of the sea. The passengers have been expunged —from history and from life. They’re cornered in space and in time.

The people in TRANSIT have been cornered in Marseille, waiting for ships, visas, and further passage. They’re on the run—there’s no way back for them, and no way forward. Nobody will take them in or care for them. They go unnoticed—except by the police, the collaborators, and security cameras. They’re borderline phantoms, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow. The present flashes by without acknowledging them. Continue reading "Christian Petzold on historical silence" »

Spinning off of our #BerlinalePeople series, #GoetheTO is presenting a special edition of mini profiles of media industry influencers related to the Frankfurt Book Fair, which hosts Canada as a guest country of honour in 2020 and 2021. Meet the President and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair; the initiator of international partnerships and coordinator of the Frankfurt Book Fair's Book-to-Film activities at the Berlinale and Cannes; and the head of the Advisory Board Film @ Book Fair and Director of the DFF - Deutsches (German) Film Institute & Film Museum in Frankfurt.

Name & role: Ellen Harrington, Head of the Frankfurt Book Fair Advisory Board Film. Director DFF - Deutsches (German) Film Institute & Film Museum in Frankfurt since 2018. Previously Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, CAA Creative Artists Agency, Punch Productions/Warner Bros., New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater, et al. Continue reading "#Books-On-Film: Ellen Harrington, Head of the..." »

You are a student, sitting in your father’s comfortable modernist smart home in the forests of British Columbia, preparing for your exam on a giant hovering screen. The power goes off, the Internet cuts out. You dig out an old transistor radio and look for books on edible plants on the shelves. What remains when global connectivity lapses, supermarkets permanently run out of toilet paper, and governments slowly fade into history? This is the premise of Toronto filmmaker Patricia Rozema’s 2015 eery near-future dystopia Into the Forest (trailer). “There’s nothing,” Elliot Page’s character says with the affronted perplexity of 21st century implicitness and insecurity.

Control over our fragile lives is a modern mirage, as we were reminded again this week, with Facebook down, Instagram down, various apps down, work servers down, telecom services interrupted. Filmmakers like Canada's Patricia Rozema or Germany's Ulrich Köhler have been projecting the likely creeping end of our Anthropocene with prescient dystopian gestures. So will the apocalypse be streamed or is this a taste of the apocalypse of our streaming lives? Continue reading "Will the Apocalypse be Streamed?" »

Francis’ world is upside down, in flight. The young African is submerged in the Mediterranean, his girlfriend Ida drowned. The water is red and black, ominously hinting at darker, bloodier depths that will resurface later in mashed up flashbacks of ritual, violence, and love. A visually stunning, bold, life-and-death beginning for Burhan Qurbani’s much anticipated retelling of Alfred Döblin’s classic Berlin Alexanderplatz, a kind of Ulysses of modern German literature, famously interpreted by Fassbinder and his lead Günter Lamprecht. Qurbani, in the Berlinale competition for the second time after his invitation for Shahada ten years ago, vehemently rejects RWF’s 1980 mini-series as a reference point, his work “loosely based” on the late Weimar novel of poverty, hardship, and despair. You might remember Qurbani's hard-hitting and precise refugee and neo-Nazi drama We are Young. We are Strong (Goethe Films Toronto 2016). The Berlin filmmaker, with a slew of Berlin-set films to his name, opened the press conference by saying that he feels he failed the book Berlin Alexanderplatz in his high school literature class, but gladly he doesn’t fail Döblin in his latest drama (trailer). Continue reading "Berlinale 2020: BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ #review" »

Buy tickets for Fabian (GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox, North American premiere, Oct 12 only)

The wind turns. These words, in the farewell letter of a young man who has tired of his life, constitute one of two sentences that neatly sum up the famous story Dominik Graf revisits in his film Fabian, or Going to the Dogs. The other sentence is glimpsed on an advertising poster that crops up in a couple of scenes in the film. It says, ominously, Learn to swim.

Kästner's novel follows Jakob Fabian, a jaded yet altruistic young Germanist, in his explorations of Berlin— and himself—in the early 1930s. With Fabian, we dive into the excesses of the city's nightlife, a world of refined brothels, extravagant artists' studios and illicit bars, where young and not-so-young men and woman feverishly live it up, as if tomorrow may never come. Continue reading "Fabian, our contemporary" »