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    German cinema well represented at Locarno International Film Festival

    By Martin Blaney | August 4, 2009

    German cinema is very well represented at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival (August 5-15) which will be the artistic director Frederic Maire’s fourth and last edition before he hands over the reins to Olivier Pere and takes up the running of the Swiss Cinematheque this autumn.

    Two German-international co-productions have been invited to screen in the Official Competition:

    – Berlin-based Twenty Twenty Vision co-produced Filippos Tsitos’ Akadimia Platonos, a comedy about today’s multi-cultural Greece, where an Athenian nationalist sees all his certainties shaken when he discovers his Albanian roots.

    – Hamburg’s Intervista Digital Media is the German partner of She, A Chinese, the highly anticipated second film from filmmaker-novelist Xiaolu Guo, which charts the trajectory of a young Chinese girl emigrating to Great Britain and life without roots.

    Meanwhile, no less than three German films will have their world premiere on the Piazza Grande’s nightly open-air screenings:

    – Detlev Buck’s Same Same But Different, starring David Kross, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Anatole Taubman, Mario Adorf, adapted from the bestselling novel by Benjamin Prüfer;

    – Ludi Boeken’s Unter Bauern – Retter in der Nacht, recounting the true story of a Jewish family who found refuge for almost three years with farmers in Westphalia during the Second World War, with Veronica Ferres, Armin Rohde, Margarita Broich, Martin Horn, Lia Hoensbroech.

    – and the HFF Munich graduate Byambasuren Davaa (The Story of the Weeping Camel) will be presenting her latest docudrama The Two Horses Of Genghis Khan (Chingisiyn Hoyor Zagal) as the festival’s closing film on the Piazza Grade on August 15. The exploration of Mongolian culture with the famous singer Urna as our guide is being handled internationally by Atrix Films.

    Meanwhile, Asli Özge’s German-Turkish-Dutch co-production Men On The Bridge (Köprüdekiler) – which won the Golden Tulip Award for best film in the national compettiion at the Istanbul International Film Festival in April – will be screened in the competitive section of the Filmmakers of the Present sidebar, while the shorts Edgar by Fabian Busch and Kokon by Till Kleinert can be seen in the Leopards of Tomorrow – International Competition, which is reserved for young directors who have not yet made feature films.

    At the same time, the Here&Elsewhere sidebar has programmed the Kurdish-Iraqi director Hiner Saleem’s dramatisation of history from a distance in the Franco-German co-production Après la chute which shows a group of Iraqi exiles in an apartment in Berlin watching a live broadcast of the fall of Saddam Hussein,

    Furthermore, the Critics’ Week will present the international premiere of the Austrian-German co-production Pianomania – Auf der Suche nach dem perfekten Klang by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis about a man’s quest for the perfect sound.

    The German presence at Locarno is not restricted to films alone. Actress Nina Hoss – who is known to international audiences particularly from her roles in films by Christian Petzold – will be a member of the festival’s International Jury judging the Official Competition, while director Angela Schanelec (Marseille) has been invited to serve on the jury of the Filmmakers of the Present competition, and Maike Mia Höhne, curator of the „Berlinale Shorts“, as a member of the Leopards of Tomorrow jury.

    Further information about Locarno’s festival programme can found at www.pardo.ch

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