Focus on German Cinema at Montreal Jubilee Festival

German cinema received a big boost when, altogether, 38 festival entries were programmed in various sections at the 25th Montreal World Film Festival(23 August to 3 September 2001). A tip of the hat goes to festival director Serge Losique and programmer Danièle Cauchard for booking four German films in the feature competition, another two in the shorts competition, plus two more in the »World Cinema: Reflections of Our Times« section. These, in addition to the »Focus on German Cinema« sidebar series that included 12 features and 18 shorts.

Der Tunnel (The Tunnel), Roland Suso Richter ­ Competition

From the very beginning, timing was essential to guarantee the success of this quite extraordinary »Berlin story«. As the 40th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall (13 August 1961) approached, teamWorx producer Nico Hofmann collaborated with director Roland Suso Richter on The Tunnel, a two-part telefeature thriller. When it was aired in mid January on SAT 1, The Tunnel made television history ­ no less than seven million viewers sat glued to their TV sets for two nights in a row. One reason for the remarkable success of the TV series is obvious: Der Tunnel is based on fact. Another was the care given to reconstruct the tunnel on the backlot of Studio Babelsberg. Also, exteriors were shot in Prague to capture the atmosphere of Berlin in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Yet another reason for the high viewing quota was the historical enigma: that once hated, ominous wall that had divided a city and separated families has now practically disappeared from the Berlin scene since its momentous fall on 9 November 1989! Thus, Berliners could look back with some empathy, compassion, and forbearance on events of forty years ago. And they could relive one of the searing dramas of the Cold War: the construction of an underground tunnel in Berlin, from West to East, to enable people to escape to freedom. They were always »Berlin’s best kept secret« ­ for only thus could people be smuggled across.

Das Experiment (The Experiment), Oliver Hirschbiegel ­ Competition

Oliver Hirschbiegel’s first feature film made directly for cinema release (after several telefeatures), Das Experiment was not only a hit at the boxoffice, but was also showered with a bundle of prestigious awards: three Bavarian Film Prizes (Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Camera), followed by a pair of Lola Awards for Moritz Bleibtreu (Best Actor) and Justus von Dohnànyi (Best Supporting Actor). One major reason for the success of this psycho-thriller was the fact that The Experiment is based on an actual research project conducted at Stanford University, during which a laboratory-supervised test of the social phenomenon known as »intoxication of power« is probed and analyzed under clinical observation onto its very limits ­ until the human beings in question might completely lose control of themselves and run amuck. In the case of the Stanford experiment the project was broken off at the critical moment so that no physical or psychological harm was inflicted on any of the participants. In the case of the filmed version we see what probably would have happened had the experiment not been interrupted: brutality, abuse of power, bloody beatings, homicide. What happens during the second half of The Experiment is why the film rose quickly to become one of season’s box office hits and win deserved awards for its acting finesse and polished production credits. For those not acquainted with the name Oliver Hirschbiegel, he’s one of Germany better TV directors, who over the past 15 years has been cited on several occasions for his crime dramas, psycho-thrillers, and fast-paced genre telefeatures. He was awarded Best Director Award at Montreal.

Engel & Joe, Vanessa Jopp ­ Competition

Back in 1981, screenwriter Kai Hermann scripted Uli Edel’s Christiane F. ­ Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a box office hit about kids on drugs who hang around Bahnhof Zoo in West Berlin. Now, twenty years later, he has scripted Vanessa Jopp’s Engel & Joe, the setting this time the railway station in Cologne where punks and junkies, dropouts and runaways hang out. To all intents and purposes, then, Engel & Joe is a remake of Christiane F ­ although both films draw their inspiration from real life and a true story. In Engel & Joe the focus is on the 17-year-old punk Engel (»Angel« is his nickname) and the 15-year-old runaway Joe (Johanna is her real name), two dropouts who hang with the drug-scene crowd and can’t come to terms with family or society. Engel was raised in a orphanage, and Joe’s mother is a pill-swallowing egomaniac. The pair meet before the Cologne Cathedral when Joe’s dog runs off into the punk crowd and is stopped by Engel. Jana Pallaske, who costarred in Esther Gronenborn’s fiction-documentary alaska.de (2000), is Joe. Robert Stadlober, last seen as the lame boy in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Crazy (2000) plays Engel ­ and was awarded Best Actor at Montreal. As for Vanessa Jopp, she graduated from the München TV and Film Academy, made some shorts and music-videos, and worked in television before directing her breakthrough feature film: Vergiss Amerika (Forget America) (2000). Awarded the HypoVereinsbank Prize at the Filmfest München, the First Steps Award in Berlin, and a Bavarian Film Prize. The same team that helped to guarantee the success of Forget America are back on Engel and Joe. Judith Kaufmann’s handheld camera underscores the story’s authenticity by filming the action at eye-level and mostly from Joe’s perspective.

Annas Sommer (Anna’s Summer), Jeanine Meerapfel ­ World Cinema

Name a Jeanine Meerapfel film, and the first thought that comes to mind is where it was shot. Malou, starring Ingrid Caven, is a Berlin film, although the narrative line traces the route into exile taken by her mother during the Nazi period. Die Verliebten (Days to Remember) (1987), starring Barbara Sukowa in an unabashed romantic love story, was shot near Split in the Croatian republic of Yugoslavia. And La Amiga (The Girlfriend) (1988), an Argentinean-German coproduction presented at the 1989 Montreal festival, stars Liv Ullman in a drama set against the events at the Plaza del Mayo in Buenos Aires. Spanish actress Angela Molina is the female protagonist in Anna’s Summer, a German-Spanish-Greek coproduction. A middle-aged photo-journalist, she arrives on a small Greek island to take possession of a home she has inherited ­ discovers an old family truck that contains some important documents about the odyssey of her father, a Sephardic-Jew who fled with his family into exile from the Nazis. At the same time, she relives the pains of a deceased husband. The summer of nostalgia and discovery ­ striking for the landscape images captured by the camera of Andreas Sinanos ­ draws to an end when Anna meets Nikola, a handsome young Greek who dreams of leaving the tranquil island for the excitement of the city. Their brief affair comes abruptly to an end: when Anna decides to remain on the island, Nikola requests the key to her Berlin apartment.

Der schöne Tag (A Fine Day), Thomas Arslan ­ Focus

The third film in his trilogy on Turkish youths living in Berlin, Turkish-German director Thomas Arslan’s Der schöne Tag is best appreciated when viewed in context with his earlier Geschwister ­ Kardesler (Siblings) (1996 ) and Dealer (1999), the latter awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize in the program of the International Forum of Young Cinema at the 1999 Berlinale. In Siblings, a family portrait that focused on the complex and contrasting life-styles of three teenagers born to a German mother and a Turkish father, every shot, scene, and word spoken by nonprofessional actors rings true. Dealer, the second film in the trilogy, saw actor-musician Tamer Yigit as a small-time drug dealer who dreams of something better but doesn’t quite know what. In A Fine Day, the third film in the trilogy, the focus is on one day in the life of a 21-year-old Turkish-German single girl living in Berlin with a boyfriend she has grown tired of. We follow her to her routine job of dubbing a film into German (Eric Rohmer’s A Summer Tale, in homage to one of Arslan’s favorite directors) and a casting appointment for a new Berlin production (Hanns Zischler as the director). A minimalist film with quiet moments that linger in the memory well after the film experience, it’s also remarkable for one aesthetic twist that both surprises and delights: when the girl sits down with her mother to talk about her decision to leave a boyfriend who does little more than just sit around the apartment, the mother speaks in Turkish and the girl responds in German. No better ploy could be used to illustrate the gap in family relations in multicultured Berlin.

Heidi M., Michael Klier ­ Focus

The third film in Michael Klier’s Berlin trilogy, Heidi M. follows a full decade after his Ostkreuz (East Crossing) (1991) and twelve years after his Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind (Things Are Better Anywhere But Here) (1989). Each deals with lonely people, desolate urban landscapes, and moral dilemmas ­ and each is a simple story honed to its core by a genuine auteur with the style and vision to match. To some extent, these Berlin stories reflect the director’s own wanderlust ways. In Things Are Better Anywhere But Here, awarded a Grimme Prize, a wandering Pole leaves Warsaw for West Berlin and ends up in New York, earning his keep along the way by hustling jobs and changing hard currency (Klier’s own fate). In Ostkreuz, awarded the HypoBank Grant Prize at Filmfest München, the focus is on a teenaged girl whose family has escaped from East Germany via Hungary and is now living in a container for refugees in West Berlin. Having lost respect for her mother and without much interest in school, she teams with a Pole to deal in the blackmarket ­ until the girl decides that’s enough and reports him to the police. In Heidi M. the focus is on a lonely middle-aged woman (Katrin Sass), who runs a street-corner shop in East Berlin, has been abandoned by her husband, and can hardly bear the departure of her teenaged daughter for a lengthy stay in Australia. Another woe is added when she meets, and falls in love with, a man who is trying to make contact with his runaway teenaged son. Katrin Sass was awarded a Lola for Best Actress at this year’s German Film Awards. All the films in Michael Klier’s Berlin trilogy were lensed by the talented French camerawoman Sophie Maintigneau.

So weit die Füsse tragen (As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me), Hardy Martins ­ Focus

Over forty years ago, Fritz Umgelterrsquo;s So weit die Füsse tragen (1959) premiered on Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) as a four-part tv-series commissioned by the visionary Wilhelm Semmelroth. Based on a true story, this 400-minute adaptation of Josef Martin Bauerrsquo;s novel made television history ­ indeed, the streets were empty as families followed on their black-and-white TV sets the homecoming of a captured German soldier from a Russian POW camp in Siberia over a stretch of three years (1949-52). It should be added that this period of hardship at the end of the 1940s was felt by nearly every German family, for no one knew whether a loved one might still be alive in some distant POW camp. And it wasnrsquo;t until the mid-1950s, after an agreement had been reached between West Germany and the Soviet Union, that POWs began to straggle home at intervals. In Hardy Martins’s version, Clemens Forell, the hero in As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me, was sentenced to 25 years in a Siberian labor camp to work in a lead mine. After three years, he receives an escape plan from a fellow-prisoner, a terminally ill physician (Michael Mendel), and breaks out on his own in the dead of winter with little more than the clothes on his back, some dried bread, a compass, and a pistol. Before him lies a stretch of 8,000 miles ­ from the tundra of eastern Siberia to the steppes of Middle Asia to the Persian border ­ and behind him in hot pursuit follows Kamenev, the vindictive camp commander, who must bring the escaped prisoner back at all costs. Against a stunning backdrop of snow-covered mountains and valleys, seemingly impenetrable forests, and raging rivers, we follow Clemens Forell (Bernhard Bettermann) as he battles the elements, boards passing trains, fights wolves, brawls with criminals, is rescued from near death by an Inuit tribe, winters in the arms of the chiefrsquo;s granddaughter, and is finally helped by a Polish Jew to cross the Soviet border to Persia ­ where his identity still has to be ascertained with the help of a old family photograph in order to guarantee his return home.

German Shorts at Montreal

Holger Ernst’s Kleine Fische (Little Fish), awarded Second Prize by the International Jury, has a merry time with a 12-year-old lad’s awakening sexual life at a public swimming pool. Menga Huonder-Jenny’s Berlintaxi, scripted by Swiss writer Silvio Huonder, features a woman taxi driver on a night shift that beings her into contact with a bunch of weird nighthawks. And two black comedies hit their mark at Montreal: Lancelot von Naso’s Fenstersturz (Falling for Art), a spoof about a Munich art student who takes a line from Delacroix’s notebook seriously, and Das Taschenorgan (The Pocket Organ), a laugh-in on the foibles of mixing up organs in a surgery room.

Ronald Holloway