German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

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 Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, filmmaker Herzog and scientist Clive Oppenheimer take us to the farthest corners of the world to trace meteors and comets and their impact on religions and culture. The premise is alluring (if not fully fulfilled), connecting past, present and future over two hours: How can pre-human events shape our thinking and feeling, as a “simulacrum”, an image or representation of something? Continue reading "#TIFF20 review: Fireball by Werner Herzog &..." »

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.

1000 miles from where I was growing up, in the middle of Europe (the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg), 8,372 men were killed as I was finishing university and getting ready to move to Canada, exactly 50 years after WWII and the Holocaust. Many films have been made about the 1995 Screbrenica massacre, and it is not often that you find a truly impactful dramatization outside of Anglo-American fictionalisations (often centred around Western protagonists like war reporters or humanitarians) or documentaries. Quo Vadis, Aida? is one such drama, entirely female-helmed and set in a male world. Bosnian director and screenwriter Jasmila Žbanić (Berlinale Golden Bear winner 2006), Austrian cinematographer Christine A. Maier and Serbian lead actress Jasna Djuricic accomplish a remarkable feat. Continue reading "#TIFF20 review: Quo Vadis, Aida?" »

Love is a business at "Family Romance, LLC”, Werner Herzog's latest film as well as the (real) company that offers a human substitute rental service, inventing absent fathers or stand-in companions as needed. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps fulfill the dreams and emotional needs of his clients. Like the mother of the 12-year-old girl Mahiro who hires Ishii to impersonate the absent father. Soon, reality begins to blur around the #fakefeels.

How did Werner Herzog, the nomad, the adventurer, the extreme athlete in the filmmaking pantheon, get to such an emotional and vulnerable place, and to Japan? (2-min video review) Continue reading "Emotions by Proxy: Herzog’s “Family Romance,..." »

After the Austrian chainsaw massacre (THE CHILDREN OF THE DEAD at Berlinale Forum) now a "German chainsaw massacre," alas without a Schlingensief’s political acumen or sensibility for the signs of the times. Fatih Akin is clearly getting ready for his first Hollywood gig, directing Stephen King’s FIRESTARTER. “Playing with genre film has been running through my work since Short Sharp Shock in 1998,“ says Akin.

I initially walked out neither loving nor hating The Golden Glove, giving a "yes but" interview to a colleague just after the screening. It took me a day to get off the fence about Golden Bear winner Fatih Akin’s lastest Berlinale competition title. Continue reading "#Berlinale19 #review: Horror, Honka, Hamburg..." »

Happy to bring this to Toronto as a Canadian premiere, a year after I saw it at Berlinale 2014 and quickly realised it was the hit film in the Perspective German Cinema section, reviewing it as follows -- still holds true after two more viewings:

We have a winner: Best German Film so far goes to "Age of Cannibals", the German edition of “The Wolf of Wall Street” and the film with the most buzz in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino (Perspective German Cinema).

Two men on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and one young woman less so. "Someone has to do it" -- the eternal excuse of the consulting class — doesn't cut it when it comes to justifying the actions of the three consultants (all great actors, effectively directed by Johannes Naber), who travel the world in the name of capitalism. Continue reading "Berlinale 2014 REVIEW: Age of Cannibals" »

East Germany. Summer, late 70’s. After her boyfriend Wassilij’s apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin Wall with her young son Aleksej, leaving her traumatic memories behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij’s mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.

This is the story told by our European Union Film Festival selection 2014, Christian Schwochow's award-winnning "West". Schwochow based his latest film on his own experience of escaping the GDR as a child as well as the much lauded 2003 novel "Lagerfeuer" --camp fire-- by Julia Franck. When asked what fascinated him about the book, the filmmaker replied: "This very special place: We knew that those West German emergency camps that housed GDR refugees existed, nut not what it meant to live there for so long. To me that was totally new and exciting. Hardly anyone knows that the secret services were in those camps, interrogating people. And that people had to more or less strip naked before being let in."

See "West" on 21 November, 6pm, at the Royal Cinema, one night only & free at EUFF. Meanwhile, get a taste of the tense atmosphere in the story with this excerpt from the book, describing the moment where Nelly, Aleksej, and her West German boyfriend Gerd are driving across a bridge and get stopped by East German police: Continue reading "REVIEW: Literary echoes in "West"" »

Screen loved it, The Hollywood Reporter hated it in Locarno; the German media were equally polarized. I walked in fully prepared to join the latter camp. Press kit poetry like "life-affirming","moving" and "tragicomedy" frequently has me running for the hills.

I'm glad I didn't with the next major German feature to premiere at TIFF14, "Tour de Force". The film's German title is more ambiguous: 'There and gone', as well as 'mad about someone' -- both sentiments that are important to the story. Yes, you have to take tissues, but in a good way. We cried for an hour and laughed for the rest. Not any easy feat for a young director --Christian Zuebert (of the popular but slightly kitschy "Three Quarter Moon")-- doing a movie that deals with assisted suicide, without a whiff of judgment either way. The question here is not whether (we go into the film with the protagonist's plan set) but when. Or more precisely: when is it too early, when is it too late for a chosen but inevitable death.

Continue reading "#TIFF14 REVIEW: TOUR DE FORCE & FAREWELL PARTY" »

Remember a great nerdy Tom Schilling roaming the streets of Berlin in last year's hit movie "Oh Boy"? In "Who am I", a great nerdy Schilling roams through Berlin on Ritalin.

The film has been pitched as a "hacker drama", with a colourful foursome of popular German actors -not including Jackie Chan, that's "Who Am I?"--hacking for the greater good (aka social engineering IRL). And for fun. Until someone makes a mistake.

Funny it is --when you experience writer-director Baran bo Odar (previously of "The Silence") live, you see it comes naturally to him-- and sometimes it veers into the silly (see poster). But I think the creators know it and are toying with it (and us). As bo Odar says after the TIFF world premiere: "It's like your child, you can't change it."

The visual realization in a parallel "dark net" universe keeps it fresh as does the funky electronica score. And just when you think this is a usual suspect (comfortingly, both Russians and Americans are still the bad guys), the director pulls some nice trickery out of his hat. Continue reading "#TIFF14 REVIEW: Who am I." »

Delving into our troubled past is a favourite subject for Germany’s leading filmmakers, see our upcoming 1980s-set GOETHE FILMS program “Before the Fall” (including "Barbara"). Of late, German art-house directors have been moving beyond the GDR and the Stasi: to Germany immediately after World War II, with echoes of the Holocaust. Not a new wave but an older theme revisited, compare Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy.

Berlin 1945. Christian Petzold is back at TIFF, after the lasting impression he left here with “Barbara” and "Jerichow". In this world premiere of “Phoenix” he reunites top actors Nina Hoss and Ronald Zehrfeld in another story of a fiercely determined woman — and the deeply divided society to which she belongs — caught between a tragic past and an uncertain future.

I am normally not one to easily suspend my disbelief, especially when it comes to historical material, but here the magic works (give it 10 minutes at the beginning). Continue reading "#TIFF14 REVIEW: PHOENIX & LABYRINTH -..." »

#TIFF14 Day 1 is Cannes Day. Even before breakfast, I had seen a highlight, the Palme d’Or winning Turkish-German co-production "Winter Sleep" (the first Turkish Cannes winner in three decades).

TIFF got a great return on their travel investment this year with programmers bringing back no less than 14 winners from the Côte d'Azur, & I am happy to catch up on half of them, starting today with "Winter Sleep" and "Jauja", both German co-productions. To be followed by Canadian heroes Dolan's "Mommy" & Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars", as well as Godard's "Goodbye to Language" (sharing the Jury Prize with "Mommy") among others.

The longest film at Cannes & TIFF at 3 hours 16 minutes, "Winter Sleep" is dialogue-heavy, but hang in there. Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells the story of a former actor who now runs a hotel, of his unravelling marriage and the clash between perception and self-perception.

I wouldn't call it 3 hours of bliss like the French film poster did (I assume the sleeping critic next to me wouldn't either). Continue reading "#TIFF14 REVIEW: Day 1 is Cannes Day" »