Okay film fans, this is the closing weekend of the Berlin Film Festival. The Economist has a pretty nice writeup on the resurgence of
German Cinema. The article is subscription only but highlights as well as a list of the notable films mentioned therein is included below.
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German films are riding on a wave of critical and commercial acclaim as directors find that they can make people laugh—to everyone's surprise
“WHEREVER I go in the world�, says Dieter Kosslick, director of the Berlin film festival, “there is a real sense of excitement about German films.� This optimism has been growing ever since “Good Bye Lenin!� became a hit in 2003, grossing $80m, most of it overseas.
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“Good Bye Lenin!� was also a strong contender in the Berlin film festival's main competition. Four years on, the festival, which runs from February 8th-18th, includes two new German-language offerings: “Yella�, directed by 46-year-old Christian Petzold, and “Die Fälscher� (“The Counterfeiters�), about a money-printing scam at the end of the war, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, an Austrian film-maker.
German films do not automatically make the grade in this most important of European festivals (which is more accessible to the general public than its more glamorous rivals, Venice and Cannes).
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Verena Lueken, a film critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the country's leading papers, notes that today's films squarely address those contemporary issues that matter most to Germans: migration, identity, social marginalisation and history. “
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German film-makers have discovered that if you make your film entertaining and surprising, as happened with “Good Bye Lenin!�, you can succeed at the box office.
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These deliberately modest films, belonging to what is loosely termed the “Berlin school�, rub shoulders with more conventional, full-scale location movies. Many of them are made by Constantin Film, a Munich production company. One such was Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 “Der Untergang� (“Downfall�), about Hitler's last days, the most talked-about German film in decades.
In addition to "Yella" and "Die Falscher" noted above, some of the notable films mentioned in the article include:
- “Sommer vorm Balkon� (“Summer in Berlin�), 'about two young women in dead-end jobs...'
- “Gespenster� (“Ghosts�), 'also set in a summery Berlin, is more sinister. A girl in care, Nina, is spotted by a French woman who believes her to be her baby, stolen years before from a supermarket trolley.'
- 'the film that is currently causing the biggest stir is “Das Leben der Anderen� (“The Lives of Others�), about Stasi surveillance of an East Berlin writer set five years before the fall of the wall. '
See related German arts discussions:
Discovering German MoviesDiscovering German LiteratureAnd every other topic related to
movies in general.
