| |
|
|
|
|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
The Week in Germany: Culture January 19, 2007 German Cinema Roundup - From Washington to Berlin, the Festival Landscape Hots Up The biggest annual event coordinated by the Goethe Institut in Washington is a film festival that began on Friday with a screening of "Sommer vorm Balkon" (Summer in Berlin).
Meanwhile next month's Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, lineup is taking shape, including a focus on young directors from across the globe through the International Forum of New Cinema. Special Berlinale screenings of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's landmark "Berlin Alexanderplatz" miniseries are moreover planned in honor of the 25th anniversary of the prolific German director's untimely death. Links:
Summer in Berlin Opens New Films Festival in DC
The Goethe-Institut Washington's 15th annual New Films Festival opened on Friday evening with "Sommer vorm Balkon" (Summer in Berlin). This popular showcase featuring a cornucopia of German, Swiss and Austrian productions runs from January 19-25 at Landmark Theatres' E Street Cinema. A tale of two women during a hot summer in the city, the opening film was feted at last year's Berlinale. Directed by Andreas Dresen, with a screenplay by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, it stars Nadja Uhl and Inka Friedrich. Dresen, who has won awards for previous films including "Nachtgestalten" (Night Shapes), "Halbe Treppe" (Grill Point) and "Willenbrock", has "crafted a smart comedy about two girlfriends sharing a flat," as New York's Museum of Modern Art states in its Kino! 2006 annual German film festival program. "One is a single mother who observes life from their balcony and gets involved with all the right men - who turn out all wrong," the MoMA program adds. Next week's edition of TWIG will feature an exclusive interview with Andreas Dresen, who was on hand for the premiere screening of the film in Washington. The San Francisco Goethe-Institut's 12th annual Berlin & Beyond Film
Festival, which came to a close on January 17, also opened with Dresen's
enchanting film. Links:
Berlinale Forum showcases films by young directors from Germany and across the globe
The 57th annual Berlin International Film Festival released details on Wednesday of the movies making up its special section dedicated to new emerging young directors. Anyone attending the Berlinale's Forum section next month can sample films ranging from Bollywood productions to comparisons of political life in the US and Japan. The Forum lineup includes 25 world premieres and 15 debut films. But while the films comprising the 37th Forum represent entries from 29 nations, organizers have decided this year to focus on new filmmakers from the German speaking world. This includes Thomas Imbach's I Was a Swiss Banker, an underwater fairytale from capitalist Switzerland and Ann-Kristin Reyels' "Jagdhunde" (Hounds), a movie shot in the winter in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Other German-language films featured in the Forum section include Stefan Schwietert's "Heimatklänge," which portrays three artists who develop traditional Swiss music in very different and unconventional ways. Then there is Ulrike Ottinger's portrait of Vienna's Prater, the oldest amusement park in the world. And super-8 filmmaker Fred Poulet looks back at the 2006 World Cup soccer championships in Germany from the substitutes' bench in Substitute. As usual, the Forum program also screens its share of oddball movies such as Kevin Aduaka's Elvis Pelvis, a father-and-son story revolving around pop idols Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix. Among the more serious Forum movies will be Li Ying's Mona Lisa, which tells the story of the wave of child-kidnapping in China. Mona Lisa, which has already been critically acclaimed in Asia, merges documentary and feature-film styles to tell its tale. Also from Asia is a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee, the self-portrait of the Korean-American artist and renowned Japanese actor Momoi Kaori Ichijiku no kao (Faces of a Fig Tree), about the life of a bizarre nuclear family. Korean director Lee Yoon-ki's Ad Lib Night (Aju teukbyeolhan sonnim) also touches on dysfunctional family life. China and Hong Kong will meanwhile be represented in the Forum by Yau Nai Hoi's Eye in the Sky (Gen zong). The Forum includes the world premiere of Amir Muhammad's "Apa Khabar Orang Kampung" (Village People Radio Show), a documentary portraying village life in the south Thailand home of retired Malay-Muslim communist party members. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a Thai radio serial. Two films portraying people's attempts to come to terms with life following
the end of the Balkans' wars have also been entered in the Forum. While
"Klopka" (The Trap) by Srdan Golubovic is a thriller about post-Milosevic's
Serbia, "Armin", by Ognjen Svilicic is a story about the attempts
by a father and son to escape from poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
(dpa, with TWIG tweaks) Links:
Clint Eastwood and JLo Among Berlinale Talent
Berlinale organizers also unveiled on Monday another batch of films competing for the festival's main awards, many of which strive to reveal the human side of real events. "We have succeeded in getting films by important directors of international cinema to come to Berlin," said festival director Dieter Kosslick. Among the films to be shown at this year's festival will be Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima. After his Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood will present the second movie in his two-part project looking at the legendary battle on the Japanese Pacific island in February 1945. While Flags of Our Fathers recounts events as experienced by American GIs, Letters from Iwo Jima tells the same story from the Japanese point of view. The cast in the European premiere features Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya and Tsuyoshi Ihara. The 57th Berlin Film Festival will also include the world premiere of German-Austrian co-production "Die Fälscher" (The Counterfeiters) by Stefan Ruzowitzky, which looks into the biggest counterfeiting operation ever pulled off. Towards the end of World War II, the Nazis forged millions of British pounds in order to weaken the enemy's economy. A counterfeiting plant was set up with prisoners in the concentration camps in Germany. Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow and Marie Baeumer play the leading roles in the film. Based on real events, director Gregory Nava's US production Bordertown, about a series of murders of female Mexican workers in the border town of Ciudad Juarez in the early 1990s, will have its world premiere in Berlin. The film stars Jennifer Lopez as well as Antonio Banderas, Maya Zapata and Martin Sheen. Several other films will also have their world premieres at the Berlinale, including "In Memoria di me" (In Memory of Myself) by Italy's Saverio Costanzo. Andre Techine's "Les Temoins" (The Witnesses) is set in the early 1980s against the emergence of AIDS. Starring Emmanuelle Beart, Michel Blanc, Sami Bouajila and Julie Depardieu. And Jacques Rivette's love story, "Ne touchez pas la hache" (Don't Touch the Axe), about a beautiful duchess who wards off the advances of a very passionate military officer. Starring Guillaume Depardieu, Jeanne Balibar and Michell Piccoli, Rivette's film is the screen adaptation of a Balzac novella. Among other films on show in Berlin will be The Walker, about an escort
used by elegant but lonely society ladies in Washington DC. The Walker
stars some of Hollywood's top actors including Woody Harrelson, Kristin
Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Willem Dafoe. (dpa, with
TWIG tweaks) Links:
Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz revisted
The Berlinale is also honoring the late German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder on the 25th anniversary of his untimely death with a special screening of a remastered version of his epic miniseries "Berlin Alexanderplatz". Produced in 1979/80, this made-for-TV adapatation of the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, by Alfred Döblin, has been hailed as a Fassbinder masterpiece. The series first aired on German TV in 1980 in 13 episodes and one epilogue. "It shows, through unanimously great performances, cinematography and direction, how a man through his personal faults and an unmerciful society is unable to fulfil himself," Fassbinder expert Joe Ruffell writes in sensesofcinema.com. "An obvious subject one might say, but given its length (931 minutes) and director's incredible incisive understanding of its themes (the book was Fassbinder's lifelong inspiration, the epilogue is an astounding personal meditation on his feelings about the protagonist), it is in Tony Rayns' words 'the work of a genuine master with nothing left to lose or hide'," he adds. The premiere of "Berlin Alexanderplatz: Remastered", showing parts one and two, will take place at Berlin's Admiralpalast theater on February 9. The series' stars Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Gottfried John and Döblins grandson Stefan Döblin have all confirmed their attendance. As reported by the German news portal Netzeitung.de, the entire series will air in five blocks at the Volksbühne theater on February 11 with the main actors again present. Other screenings will take place daily from February 12 to 18 at the Cinemaxx 4 film festival movie theater at the Potsdamer Platz. Fassbinder, widely considered Germany's greatest and most prolific postwar
director, died at 37 on June 10, 1982. Links: |
|
More from Germany.info  Newsletters
 Printer-Friendly
Page
Email This Article |
||
|
|||||
|
|||||
