Germany

Description: In 1989 Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet realized a film project that was commissioned by Virginie Herbin, director of the audiovisual department of the Musée d’Orsay. The film is based on Joachim Gasquet’s recollected and imagined dialogs with Cézanne, Ce qui m’a dit…(1921).

A montage comprising paintings by the artist, footage shot at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire and film scenes from both Jean Renoir’s Madame Bovary and the Straub’s The Death of Empedocles. The film is an homage to light, color, painting, nature, cinema and the terrible and glorious world of reality.Read More »

This East German movie was co-produced with studios in Hungary and Yugoslavia, with many interesting location shots (border checkpoint to West Berlin, the Gellert bath in Budapest, and more). The plot is about French drug dealers, who obtain heroin somewhere in the Middle East, and smuggle it in several steps to East Berlin, and from there to France (or so it appears), killing when necessary. The hero is an officer of East German customs, who with detective work, some masquerade, and occasional violent action ultimately unravels the whole network, of course with the support of the local customs departments.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Told in flashback, the film recounts the events leading up to the killing of good-for-nothing Curt Jurgens. Warned by her friends and relatives that Jurgens is a bad job, impulsive Ina Kahr marries him anyway. His ceaseless philandering and abuse wears away at Ina to the point that she contemplates poisoning her husband…’
– MRQERead More »

Synopsis:
A rare gem of cinematic storytelling that weaves docudrama, fictional reenactment, and experimental photography into a powerful, reflective work on the early days of German cinema. The film tells the story of the Skladanowsky Brothers, the German-born duo responsible for inventing the “bioskop”, an early version of the film projector.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
“In my memory, I retained such a dream-like impression of my stay in New York that I sometimes wondered if I had really been there.”
Louis SarnoRead More »

Plot:
Baal explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

Quote:
Screening as part of the Masters & Restorations program at this year’s MIFF is Baal, writer/director Volker Schlöndorff’s television adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play of the same name which features a rare leading performance by Schlöndorff’s contemporary in the German New Wave and master filmmaker Reiner Werner Fassbinder outside of his own films. After a single screening in 1970 it was removed from public release by Brecht’s widow, but 44 years later is making the rounds at film festivals thanks his granddaughter who has approved its release. And thankfully it was worth the wait, offering a rare treat for foreign film fans.Read More »

“The paths of people from various countries cross during the course of one night. They speak different languages, but they are fatefully bound together by the solitary quest for happiness and deliverance. Sloping paths are all that’s left for them in an age of lost perspectives, lost refuges and lost homelands. They sink deeper with every movement that should be liberating them. Every gesture of love becomes a gesture of humiliation. The desperate dance of their life has become a passionate dance of death.
In the centre of this centrifuge at the end of the millennium the Russian emigrant Valery and his lover Ljuba are turning around each other in a nocturnal round dance of desire and pain, hope and violence and the indestructible will to survive.”Read More »

Quote:
If Joaquin Phoenix met Carole Lombard in their twenties by the sea you would get the sizzle we feel in Jakob Lass’ Love Steaks.

Clemens (Franz Rogowski) arrives as a trainee at a Northern German seaside spa. He does massages, aromatherapy, and is being taught how to suck bad energy from the guests by circling his hands above their bodies. Lara (Lana Cooper) is a playful cook in the resort kitchen, constantly initiating acts of mayhem for her colleagues to react to.

As living quarters, Clemens is allotted a spacious storage room at the spa, where laundry carts are kept moving about and unused replacement garbage cans sit ominously. He has no private bathroom – no privacy to speak of at all, as there is no door – but a fabulous view of the ocean. Clemens is shy, sincere and in over his head on all accounts. Lara is bold and sexy-stupid, not in the dumb-blonde romantic comedy vein, rather mad-cap provocative. She seduces with a daring absurdity and her tango with Clemens is superb. Rogowski, a trained dancer, gives Clemens the fragility he needs to balance her shenanigans.Read More »

Plot in German

“Der in Westdeutschland lebende, iranische Filmemacher Saless (“Utopia”) schildert in seinem Drama eine deutsche Jugend am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs

Frankfurt 1944: In der Befürchtung, als Halbjude denunziert worden zu sein, muß Hans, der uneheliche Sohn einer Arbeiterin, kurz vor Kriegsende die Stadt verlassen. Als er nach der Kapitulation zurückkehrt, entdeckt er, daß seine Freundin Nora die Geliebte eines GIs geworden ist und seine Mutter immer noch von anonymen Briefen bedroht wird. Der aus politischen Gründen aus seinem Heimatland emigrierte iranische Regisseur Sohrab S. Saless zeichnet in langen, ruhigen Einstellungen das Bild eines trostlosen, zerstörten Deutschland am Ende des Krieges. Er erhielt im letzten Jahr den Großen Preis der Frankfurter Autorenstiftung.”Read More »