Genre Diversity Key in German Films
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Loading... - Marcel Fabre
- 21 Feb 2023
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German cinema looks set for a major boom this year with a strong lineup of diverse works that span historical dramas, coming-of-age tales, high-octane nostalgia, animation and sci-fi fun.
The Berlin Film Festival is bowing a muscular selection of local titles, among them “Afire,” by Berlinale mainstay Christian Petzold (“Undine”), screening in competition. The films centers on a group of young people staying at a holiday house near the Baltic Sea during a hot, dry summer, exploring volatile emotions that start to sizzle when a wildfire spreads through the surrounding forest.
Likewise vying for the Golden Bear is Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic “Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey Into the Desert,” starring Vicky Krieps (“Corsage”) as the radical Austrian author. The film examines her relationship with Swiss writer Max Frisch and her 1964 journey of self-discovery through the Egyptian desert.
“Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” by Emily Atef (“More Than Ever”) and based on the novel by Daniela Krien, is set in the Thuringian countryside of East Germany just prior to reunification in 1990 and follows a young woman who begins an all-consuming affair with a neighboring farmer twice her age.
In “Music,” Berlinale Silver Bear winner Angela Schanelec (“I Was at Home, But…”) tells a contemporary story inspired by the tragedy of Oedipus that follows a young man serving time in a prison, where he meets a kind warden.
Also in competition is “Till the End of the Night,” Christoph Hochhäusler’s romantic crime drama about an undercover cop pretending to be the lover of a trans woman, hoping the ruse will help him infiltrate a drug ring. German titles unspooling in the Berlinale Special sidebar include Robert Schwentke’s “Seneca,” a black comedy set in ancient Rome starring John Malkovich and Tom Xander that examines the strained relationship between the despotic Emperor Nero and his former tutor and adviser, the philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
In “Der vermessene Mensch,” Lars Kraume (“The People vs. Fritz Bauer”) again visits a dark period of German history with the first feature film to explore the country’s 19th-century colonization of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) and its genocide of the indigenous Ovaherero and Nama people.
“You can see how timely Germany’s colonial past is in the recent debates about looted art, restitution and discussions about ethnological collections, such as the one at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin,” says Kraume. “My recent films have all dealt with German history and up until now very little has been said about the German colonial era.”
David Wnendt’s “Sun and Concrete,” based on the autobiographical bestseller by popular comedian Felix Lobrecht, follows a group of teenage friends growing up in a social housing estate in Berlin and unable to stay out of trouble. Read More…
