German Film Fest packs promising sneak peeks
Astaple of early spring in BA, the German Film Festival runs through September 20 with a promising slate of films. For the 17th edition of the event, the organizers — German Films, Goethe Institut and the German Embassy — have put together a diverse programming, aiming for the best of the country’s recent output, from household names to international festivals entries.
The special guest of this edition is director Simon Verhoeven, who will be present for the screening of Welcome to the Hart
manns, the film that sold most tickets in Germany last year, with more than eight million viewers. On a comic bent, it focuses on a well-off family receiving a Nigerian refugee into their home, which turns into a test for every member of the household, as they battle terrorism suspicions, racism and bureaucracy.
One of the gems of the showcase is Maria Schrader’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell
to Europe, about the years in exile (19361942) of the title character, who, besides Thomas Mann, was the most-read German-language author of the 1920s. As a Jewish intellectual, the Austrian writer struggled to find his stance before the chain of events around Nazi Germany and had to flee to South America, eventually taking his own life alongside his wife.
Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker gets a rich portrayal in Christian Schwochow’s Paula, a film shot in spectacular images which depicts the title character’s drive to reach artistic achievement and her romantic take on love and marriage. The showcase also features veteran filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff’s latest work, Return to Montauk, which competed for the Golden Bear at last
year’s Berlinale. It stars Stellan Skarsgard as a European writer on a book tour in New York, haunted by a ghost from his
romantic past. Another must-see is Jakob M. Erwa’s The Centre of the
World, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Andreas Steinhöfel. The feature focuses on a summer in the life of a teenage boy who lives out blithely his first same-sex relationship as his twin sister grows increasingly distant and reserved.