German Film @ Canada - Goethe-Institut

Reposting my review of Valeska Grisebach's Cannes & TIFF success WESTERN because it is another algorithm "If you liked this film --and I did--, you will like Grisebach's earlier BE MY STAR," which we are screening 1 night only on May 14 as part of our GOETHE FILMS series "Past Forward: Directors before Cannes."

At last year's Berlinale I was impressed with Aline Fischer, a young French-German filmmaker entering the microcosm of male Arab migrants in Berlin. Perhaps she took classes with Valeska Grisebach, who achieves the same feat with WESTERN, a woman artist uniquely illuminating a hermetic male ecosystem --here German construction workers in Bulgaria.

The women who appear in the film are as diverse as they are backgrounded: the caring elderly matriarch, the storekeeper who initially to refuses to serve the German, the village girl who scoffs at the construction worker's advances, the translator who becomes the object of desire.

"As a woman, I was interested in this closed male cosmos, where women are physically absent but in other ways incredibly present. They are constantly being talked about, being fantasized. On the one hand, there’s the desire for women, on the other a great and different intimacy among the men," Grisebach told Berlin's taz newspaper. Continue reading "#TIFF17 review: WESTERN - The Woman Who Stares..." »

Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne … forget the big city lights -- real life happens in between. Or so the quintessentially German “Heimatfilms" will have us believe. The GOETHE FILMS @ TIFF Lightbox excursion "Heimat NOW" into the genre will shine a light on Germany from north to south and east to west and ask how films have reflected the country’s regionalism after reunification.

The word Heimat is famously untranslatable, holding multiple complementary meanings in German — descendance, heritage, tradition, your culture, your tribe, your family, your language: all make up one’s own personal Heimat (as author Frank Goosen argued in our interview on the topic). It is at the same time one of the most transcendental and universal terms, as everyone has a Heimat, or more than one, or a lost one, or a regained one, or a virtual one. The concept affords a wide range of important personal and group orientation -- identification, assurance, belonging-- but can become controversial when bordering on or being hijacked to foster patriotism, nationalism, and propaganda.

The term Heimatfilm has long entered the lexicon of international cinema and is constantly being reinterpreted, with a notable resurgence over the past ten or fifteen years. Continue reading "Heimat(film) now: State of the nation" »