KINO »FILM OF THE YEAR« 2003

Awarded FILM OF THE YEAR 2003 by general concensus of jury members Ron Holloway, Lutz Jenke, Ulrich Lüder, Dorothea Moritz, Christoph Sedlag, Gregor Sedlag

In Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter the theme of »losers« is reworked in five different episodes linked to 18 different people within 48 hours on the German border to Poland at Frankfurt Oder/Slubice. Distant Lights sketches the fates of these sympathetic individuals in an interlocking narrative that never loses sight of the tragic and how bitter it is for the protagonists to face the truth.

Lichter is a journey into the real world, a wrestling with the problems of today, a film for the expansion of the European Community. Hans-Christian Schmid presents painfully inhuman events just as they are. The details are precise, the credibility is underscored, the moments of truth are illuminated. The use of a hand-camera in the middle of the action invites the viewer to be a participant. The actors are cut from real life.

Lichterwas also voted Film of the Year by the Evangelical Film Office and the German Film Critics Award. It recently received two Bavarian Film Prizes: Best Screenplay Award to Hans-Christian Schmid and Michael Gutmann, and the Producers Prize to Uli Putz, Hakob Claussen, and Thomas Wöbke of Claussen + Wöbke Film, München. It was voted the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 2003 Berlinale. And it should be said on this occasion that ARTE often supports such exceptional projects as this one.