FOCUS:

One-third of this year’s Perspektive — the sixth under critic-programmer Alfred Holighaus — was comprised of documentary films, two-thirds of which entries directed by women filmmakers. In Korean director Sung-Hyung Cho’s tongue-in-cheek debut documentary Full Metal Village, awarded the Max Ophuls Prize in Saarbrücken, 40,000 heavy metal fans from around the world descend upon the otherwise peaceful village of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein, annually welcomed by the gentle populace of this rural community just northwest of Hamburg. In Maja Classen’s straight-forward documentary Osdorf, her graduation film at the Babelsberg Film School, tough youths from alien cultures discuss integration problems in an urban Hamburg ghetto, their macho behavior shaken when they pay a visit to the Fuhlsbüttel prison, known euphemistically as »Santa Fu.« In Astrid Schult’s poignant Zirkus is nich (No Circus), her short documentary at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, we follow the daily routine of a conscientious 8-year-old in the Hellersdorf district of Berlin, whose wish for some time of his own (he wants to visit the circus) is blocked by his single mother’s demands that he spend his days looking after his younger brother and sister. In Sonja Heiss’s tragicomedy Hotel Very Welcome, her graduation film at the München Film School, we follow five young European tourists on their »Asian dream« routes through India and Thailand. As it turns out in this hilarious fiction-documentary, none of the protagonists can come to terms with themselves, let alone assimilate the pleasures that an alien culture offers them. In Pepe Planitzer’s fiction chronicle Alle Alle (All Gone), three losers holed up in a rundown Brandenburg barracks try to untie the knots in their broken lives in hopes of starting all over again. Low-key performances (Milan Peschel, Eberhard Kirchberg, Maria Gruber) lift this absurd tale to one of the memorable German features at this year’s Berlinale.

Ron Holloway