Artistic director Olivier Père applauding Franceso Rosi as he receives his Career Achievement Award, courtesy Festival del Film Locarno

The change of Locarno Film Festival’s artistic director from Frédéric Maire to Frenchman Olivier Père this year didn’t see any great change in the festival’s traditional support for films from Germany or made with German partners.

No less than four of the 18 titles selected by Père for the International Competition were produced with German involvement: ranging from the world premieres of Benedek Fliegauf’s first English language film Womb, Pia Marais’ second feature At Ellen’s Age, and Serbian filmmaker Oleg Novkovic’s White White World to the international premiere of Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie, co-produced by Berlin-based Jürgen Bruning.

In addition, the nightly open-air programme on Locarno’s Piazza Grande presented the international premiere of Baran bo Odar’s thriller The Silence, with Ulrich Thomsen, Wotan Wilke Möhring, Katrin Sass and Burghart Klaussner (which had its world premiere at the Filmfest München), Marvin Kren’s debut feature and Max Ophüls Preis winner Rammbock about zombies taking over the streets of Berlin, and Eran Riklis’ new feature The Human Resources Manager which was made as an Israeli-German- French co-production.

Moreover, a total of some 10,000 festival-goers are reported to have attended the screenings of the films in the festival’s retrospective dedicated to Ernst Lubitsch, which is now being staged over the following weeks by the Cinematheque suisse in Lausanne and the Cinematheque francaise in Paris.
While the top prize, the Golden Leopard, was awarded for the second year in a row to a Chinese filmmaker (Winter Vacation by Li Hongqi), two of the German competition films were also recognised: the International Jury named Jasna Duricic Best Actress for her role in White White World – which was also named Best Film by the association of international arthouse cinemas CICAE – and the festival’s Junior Jury awarded its „Environment is quality of life“ Prize to Benedek Fliegauf’s Womb.

Meanwhile, the UBS Audience Award went to The Human Resources Manager, and two prizes went to Anthony Vouardoux’s Swiss-German co-produced short Yuri Lennon’s Landing On Alpha 46 which was competing in the Leopards of Tomorrow competition.

Apart from streamlining the programme and making various personnel changes, Olivier Père also saw his first edition launching a pilot project, the Locarno Summer Academy to foster an exchange of knowledge between the generations “and thus sustain the flow of new blood into film, in Switzerland and abroad.”

The initiative, which was organised in collaboration with Lugano’s Swiss Italian University Film Summer School, received so many applications that the organisers had to increase the number of selected participants from 20 to 30 to attend presentations given by producer Peter Rommel, filmmaker Maren Ade and her producer Janine Jackowski and Georges Goldenstern of Cannes’ Cinefondation.

The participants came from as far away as the Philippines, Lebanon and the USA as well throughout Europe (including the film schools in Ludwigsburg, Munich and Babelsberg). The general verdict at the end of the week’s programme was that the young people had been able to make useful contacts for the future and could be returning to the festival one day with completed projects that they have made together.

While the films were naturally the focus of this year’s edition, Locarno nevertheless provided the ideal venue for parties and other social events held in swiss restaurants and on hotel terraces over the 11 days: for example, the Hans Ringier Foundation’s “Diner républicain” was held for the 35th time and attended by such figures as ex-German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet and Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick before the Piazza Grande screening of the US film Cyrus on the first weekend.

More information about the 63rd edition of the Festival del Film Locarno can be found at http://www.pardo.ch

Over 500 films from 50 countries, including 240 features, were shown over the 11 days, with retrospectives dedicated to the works of the Quay Brothers, Laura Mulvey, Philippe Mora, Zeki Demirkubuz and Daniel Szczechura as well as tributes to Jean-Luc Godard and the late Polish master Wojciech Jerzy Has with complete reviews of their œuvres.

Official ERA poster, courtesy of ERA New Horizons

German cinema was featured in the festival programme with such titles as Romuald Karmakar’s Villalobos, Tanzträume (Dancing Dreams) (see review in KINO 97), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first English-language film Despair as well as numerous co-productions – ranging from the Berlinale competition films Shekarchi (The Hunter) and Na Putu (On The Path) through UK filmmaker Christopher Petit’s new film essay Content (an epilogue to his 1979 iconic debut Radio On which was produced with Wim Wenders’ Road Movies) to Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (co-produced with Berlin’s Essential Filmproduktion) which won the Audience Award and the International Film Guide Award.

Moreover, this year saw the international film critics association FIPRESCI being invited by the festival to award its much respected prize for the first time, and the secretary general Klaus Eder and the Berlinale’s East Europe consultant Nikolai Nikitin were both members of the New Polish Films Competition.

Meanwhile, a delegation from the Film Festival Cottbus – which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year from 2 – 7 November (www.filmfestivalcottbus.de) – travelled to Wroclaw to present two films from past programmes: the Croatian film The Blacks – winner of the Special Prize for Best Direction in 2009 – and Russian Alexey Balabanov’s Of Freaks And Men.

A partnership had been forged between the two festivals at the 2009 edition of ERA New Horizons and festival director Roman Gutek headed the jury in Cottbus last November. Festival guests were invited to a ‘Cottbus Cocktail’ in Wroclaw on 27 July when festival director Roland Rust announced that the sidebar entitled ‘Polskie Horizonty’ would become a permanent feature at his festival.

Audience figures this year reached 122,500 admissions, clear proof that Gutek and his team have found the right formula to attract cinema-goers from near and far to the films in the eclectic programme. It didn’t seem to matter what kind of film was showing, the cineastes flocked to each performance. Moreover, the system of booking tickets online via the festival website proved a much more comfortable alternative to standing ages in line – even if the new Polish films were invariably sold out just minutes after booking opened at midnight for the screenings of the next two days!

An innovation in Wroclaw this year was the launching of the New Horizons Studio aimed at 30 young Polish film professionals in order to give them a better understanding of the workings of the international film industry.

Over four days the participants heard presentations from producers Sandy Lieberson and Julie Baines, festival organizer Rik Vermeulen, sales agent Tine Klint together with master classes from international jury member Jonathan Caouette (he broke into the international film scene in 2004 with Tarnation) and Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

The participants included cinematographer Mikolaj Lebkowski (his film Mother Theresa Of Cats had screened this year in Gdynia and Karlovy Vary); producer Kuba Kosma and director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz, the makers of the European Film Award-nominated short Hanoi – Warsaw; composer Adrian Konarski, who wrote the score for Magdalena Piekorz’s award-winning The Welts; and director Bartosz Warwas who was featured in the Polish shorts competition with his latest film, the “mockumentary” MC: Man Of Vinyl.

Interestingly, Bartosz had recently taken part in a German-Polish initiative organized by the Leipzig-based association Ostpol as a collaboration between the German Creative Writing Programme Leipzig (DLL) and the Leon Schiller National School of Film, Television and Theatre in Lodz. The result was six German-Polish shorts under the banner of Ansichtssache 2 (A Matter of Opinion 2). More information at www.ostpol-leipzig.de.

Right at the beginning of the Studio’s programme, the young filmmakers were divided off into working groups and given the task of developing projects to be pitched to the Studio’s expert consultants on the last day before proceedings were rounded off with an evening cruise and farewell party on the River Odra.

Looking ahead to the 2011 edition, the organizers of ERA New Horizons have already revealed that there will be showcases of the work of Terry Gilliam, Japanese erotic cinema, and of past and contemporary Norwegian cinema. In addition, the festival will focus on the work of the Polish master director Andrzej Munk on the 50th anniversary of his death.

More information about Wroclaw’s ERA New Horizons can be found at www.enh.pl.

Bavaria International's Stefanie Zeitler (right) with Russian distributors, courtesy: Klaas Dierks/German Films

The 10th edition of the German Films Previews saw the showcase of new German productions being presented to around 90
international buyers in Hamburg for the first time from July 15-18. Previously, the event had been held in Munich (six times) and Cologne (the past three years), but the promotion agency German Films decided to travel further north to Hamburg to give the foreign guests a taste of another part of Germany.

The 2010 edition was organised with support from the regional film fund Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, Studio Hamburg and Hamburg Marketing, and attracted buyers from as far afield as China, Japan, USA, Colombia, Thailand, Taiwan and Australia as well as most European territories.

The 19-title programme of screenings in the CinemaxX multiplex ranged from Eric Friedler’s docu-drama Aghet about the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians between 1915 and 1918 and Christine Hartmann’s family film Hanni & Nanni through Joseph Vilsmaier’s Himalayan drama Nanga Parbat to Baran bo Odar’s The Silence (Das letzte Schweigen) which had its world premiere at June’s Filmfest München and will be screened on the Piazza Grande in Locarno in August.

Beta Cinema's Andreas Rothbauer with buyers from China, courtesy: Klaas Dierks/German Films

The buyers were also able to see such films Wolfgang Panzer’s The Day Of The Cat (Der grosse Kater), which boasted a stellar cast including Bruno Ganz, Marie Bäumer, and Ulrich Tukur, as well as the family film Tiger-Team, Ralf Huettner’s box-office success Vincent Wants To Sea (Vincent Will Meer), and Uli Edel’s rapper biopic Electric Ghetto (Zeiten ändern dich).

In addition, promo-reels were shown of such forthcoming films as Tom Tykwer’s urban love story Three (Drei), Adnan G. Köse’s musical fairytale Homies and Lars Kraume’s futuristic drama The Days To Come (Die kommenden Tage).

Apart from catching new films on the big screen or in the DVD library, the international guests also had an opportunity to become acquainted with the delights of the city of Hamburg – from a trip through the container harbour to a guided tour by night of the famous St. Pauli district and the Reeperbahn – as well as to meet members of the local film industry such as producers Klaus Maeck (Corazon Film International) and Ute Schneider (schneider+groos filmproduktion), film funder Eva Hubert and film director Fatih Akin.

Not surprisingly, the buyers flocked to see the promo-teaser for Tykwer’s film Drei – his first film in German for around 10 years - and also took the opportunity to catch Hungarian director Benedek Fliegauf’s first English language film Womb which will have its world premiere in Locarno’s Official Competition in August.

Another big draw was the Norwegian film Home For Christmas by Bent Hamer, which will presumably premiere at one of the autumn festivals this year.
Other films creating a “buzz” among the buyers included The Day Of The Cat, Vincent Wants To Sea, Oliver Schmitz’s Un Certain Regard film Life, Above All, and Srdjan Koljevic’s The Woman With a Broken Nose which has been invited to show at the Raindance, Warsaw and Hof film festivals this autumn.
The move to Hamburg for the German Films Previews was deemed a great success with the participants who had to walk only a small distance from the recently renovated Radisson Blu hotel to the CinemaxX multiplex for their screenings each day.

So, here’s to the 11th edition being staged in the North German city next July!

The regional elections in North Rhine-Westphalia in May meant that the Medienforum NRW saw its dates this year at the end of June head-to-head with Filmfest München and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Despite having to cope with this competition as well as sweltering temperatures, the Filmstiftung NRW brought to a compact and varied programme of film screenings and discussion events over four days from 26-29 June.

The KinoSpecials kicked off with a special closed presentation of Anita and Fred (Satte Farben vor Schwarz), the debut feature film by Swiss-German filmmaker Sophie Heldman, who graduated from the German Film & Television Academy (dffb) in 2004.

Inspired by actual events, the film centres on the couple Anita and Fred who have been happily married for 50 years and are still very much in love. Fred’s terminal illness – whose existence is only known to his wife – brings some surprising changes in their lives and those of their family.

The casting of Satte Farben vor Schwarz sees veteran actors Senta Berger and Bruno Ganz appearing for the first time together before the camera. Producer Titus Kreyenberg revealed after the screening that the film has been invited to compete in San Sebastian in September and have its premiere at the Hof Film Days at the end of October.

Sunday evening then saw the premiere at the Filmforum NRW cinema of Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men, the winner of the Silver Lion for Best Direction in Venice last year, with lead actress Pegah Freydoni and director Neshat in attendance to lead a spirited discussion with the audience.

The Film Conference also scored a first in this year’s film programme by showing the complete Yusuf trilogy by Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu, beginning with Yumurta (Egg) and followed by Süt (Milk) and Bal (Honey), the winner of this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlinale (see report in KINO 97).

In a public interview with the journalist Frank Olbert of the Kölner Stadtanzeiger before the screening of Bal, Kaplanoglu said that he could not say „whether cinema is primarily a visual medium. For me, filmmaking is connected with poetry because I come from a culture where the people have expressed their feelings for centuries through poetry.“

After the screening, he was joined by producers Bettina Brokemper and Johannes Rexin on stage to talke about the film’s genesis and answer questions from a packed auditorium.

(Rexin also told KINO – German Film that his company Heimatfilm is now preparing its third film with Kaplanoglu after Milk and Honey)

The Film Conference’s organiser Katharina Blum should also be congratulated for organising a showcase presenting the „best of“ student work from the region’s film schools – ifs Internationale Filmschule Köln, the Academy of Media Arts (KHM) in Cologne and Kunsthochschule and the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts – which had all been supported by the Filmstiftung NRW.

The whole gamut of style and genres was offered by such films as Andrzej Król’s First Steps Award-nominee Birthday, Bogdana Vera Lorenz’s hard-hitting Home Game (Heimspiel) about a teacher of ethics leading a double life as a ruthless hooligan, Florian Riegel’s moving documentary Holding Still about a paraplegic, as well as Isabel Prahl’s one-minute social commercial Poverty Tells Many Stories (Armut kennt viele Geschichten) which won the prize for best direction at the Cannes Advertising Festival in June.

Many of these titles have already had success at international festivals, but are certainly worth catching if they haven’t yet been to your neck of the woods.

Wim Wenders in conversation about 3D, courtesy Heike Herbertz/Filmstiftung NRW

Meanwhile, the conference discussion programme was graced by the presence of legendary filmmaker Wim Wenders who took time out from shooting in Wuppertal for his latest film Pina (see report in KINO 97) to come over to Cologne to share his thoughts and experiences of working in stereoscopic 3D.

„There is nothing more fantastic for documentaries than to shoot them in 3D because this enables you to create a new approach to reality,“ he said.

Berlin-based producer Martin Hagemann of zero film is similarly enthusiastic of the opportunities opened up by 3D as he prepares the production of the science fiction thriller Creeping Zero with UK partners for shooting later this year. “The mis-en-scéne plays a much more important role,” he noted after having made a 10-minute teaser in 3D to attract financiers to the project.

More information on the International Film Conference and the Medienforum NRW can be found at: www.medienforum.nrw.de

Johannes Naber received the Special Jury Prize for his debut The Albanian (Der Albaner), courtesy Vladimir Maximov/MIFF

The Silver St. George prize for Best Actor went to The Albanian's lead actor Nik Xhelilaj, courtesy Vladimir Maximov/MIFF

German cinema scored a double triumph at this year’s Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF, June 17 – 26) when feature debutant Johannes Naber’s immigration drama The Albanian (Der Albaner) picked up the Special Jury Prize and the “Silver St. George” for Best ActorSfor lead actor Nik Xhelilaj.

Naber’s screenplay, which he wrote with co-authors Christoph Silber and Alexander Stemmle, centres on 19-year-old Albanian Arben (played by Xhelilaj) who has no work and little future in his Albanian mountain village. His secret sweetheart Etleva has become pregnant, but his father is too poor to pay the bride price. Her family threaten revenge and so Arben decides to escape to Germany to find work and raise enough money to return home and marry Etleva before the child’s birth. However, once in Germany, he soon realises that, as an illegal immigrant and without any knowledge of the language, he will hardly have a chance to make the kind of money he dreamt of. Alone and full of longing for Etleva, Arben now struggles just to survive …

Following its world premiere at MIFF, The Albanian is now due to screen at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the “East of the West” competition at the beginning of July.

The International Jury led by Luc Besson and including The White Ribbon co-producer Dr. Veit Heiduschka presented the “Golden St. George” Grand Prix for Best Film in the Main Competition to another feature debut and world premiere, Brother (Hermano) - about two brothers in the slums of Caracas dreaming of becoming footballers - by Venezuelan filmmaker Marcel Rasquin.

Matti Geschonneck’s Berlin, Boxhagener Platz (see review in KINO 97), which had had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special in February,  was also selected for the MIFF’s main competition lineup, while RP Kahl’s erotic drama Bedways – another premiere from the Berlinale 2010 – screened in the Perspectives Competition.

This latter competition’s jury headed by veteran UK director John Irvin awarded its “Silver St. George” for Best Film to the black comedy Reverse (Revers) by Polish filmmaker Borys Lankosz for.

Other German films shown at the 10-day event, which attracted over 25,000 spectators, included Feo Aladag’s When We Leave (Die Fremde), Doris Dörrie’s The Hairdresser (Die Friseuse) — reviews for both in KINO 97— and David Sieveking’s David Wants To Fly.

Running parallel to the film festival was the second edition of the Moscow Co-Production Forum from June 18 -20.

150 Russian participants and 150 foreign delegates attended three days of roundtable discussions and one-to-one meetings for the Forum’s selected 23 projects looking for potential co-producers and funders.

Some of the projects came to Moscow with a German partner already onboard: Uzbek director Saodat Ismailova’s drama 40 Days Of Silence is being developed with Berlin-based Rohfilm, while Russia’s CTB Film Company has German filmmaker Benjamin Quabeck attached as the director for Last November, a drama set in post-war Kaliningrad.

Moreover, there was a large presence of figures from the German film industry at the Forum – ranging from producers Karsten Stöter (Rohfilm) and Simone Baumann (LE Vision) through film funders Kirsten Niehuus (Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg) and Manfred Schmidt (MDM Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung)  to organizers of co-production markets such as Gabriele Brunnenmeyer (Connecting Cottbus) and Sonja Heinen (Berlinale Co-Production Market).

Indeed, German producers are much sought-after partners for international co-productions between East and West with the traffic going in both directions. For example, Hamburg’s RIVA Filmproduktion will be a partner for Evgeny Gindilis’ production outfit TVINDIE on Kirill Mikhanovsky’s Cuban-set drama Fuga Mortis and The White Ribbon producer X-Filme Creative Pool has attracted producer-actor Alexey Guskov (he was recently the lead in Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert) with his company FAF Studio to be a collaborator on Achim von Borries’ 4 Days In August. In addition, Veit Helmer’s new feature project Baikonur — which begins shooting in August — has Anna Katchko’s Tandem Films onboard as a Russian partner.

Moreover, Munich’s Bavaria Film is a co-producer with production companies from Russia and the Ukraine on Alexander Mindadze’s Chernobyl drama Innocent Saturday which was pitched at the Moscow Co-Production Forum last year. The film is currently shooting on location in the Ukraine and will be released next spring to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the accident at the nuclear power station in April 1986. Bavaria Film International is handling international sales.

The high level of German participation at the Co-Production Forum was also explained by the fact that another meeting of the “Friends of the German-Russian Film Academy” association was held during the get-together at the weekend.

Politician Angelika Krüger-Leissner, spokesperson on film policy of the SPD parliamentary group in the German Bundestag, Professor Dr. Dieter Wiedemann, rector of the University for Film & Television “Konrad Wolf” (HFF) in Babelsberg, and Filmfestival Cottbus director Roland Rust were also part of the German delegation meeting with Russian counterparts to discuss the current state of relations between their two film industries and the potential for such initiatives as master classes.

At the same time, state funding of the film industry in the Russian Federation seems to be still very much in flux, although moves have been recently to make co-production easier with foreign partners.

As to when the German-Russian co-production treaty will finally be signed and ratified, this is something where both sides are tending — after the experiences of the last couple of years — to adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach.

The suggestion that all outstanding questions could soon be resolved and the treaty signed at the forthcoming Petersburg Dialogue in Ekaterinburg in mid-July is probably wildly optimistic. Watch this space.

— Martin Blaney

More information about the MIFF 2010 programme at www.moscowfilmfestival.ru and on the Co-Production Forum at  www.miffbs.ru