Film | Neu
Germany • Austria • Switzerland
January 21 –27, 2011
Landmark’s E Street Cinema
Looking over the titles in this, the 19th annual edition of Film|Neu, two themes immediately present themselves: history and genre. The opening night film, Germany’s submission for a 2011 Foreign Film Oscar, sets the pace, with producer-director-writer Feo Aladag’s internationally lauded WHEN WE LEAVE charting the troubled emancipation of a German-born Turkish woman from the bonds of tradition. In a similar vein, the determined young man in Johannes Naber’s THE ALBANIAN finds that social justice in Germany is a battle hard fought and often lost.
Also on a voyage of discovery is fledgling filmmaker Jan Raiber, whose search for ALL MY FATHERS leads to a documentary of uncommon intimacy and historical urgency. The inimitable Percy Adlon, he of BAGDAD CAFÉ fame, imagines what really happened when a cuckolded composer asked Sigmund Freud for help in the atypically mischievous Austrian-German biopic MAHLER ON THE COUCH.
No less than the president of Switzerland could also use some help, and no less a screen icon than Bruno Ganz brings him to life in THE DAY OF THE CAT, adapted with wit and melodramatic flair from the immensely popular Swiss novel. Another historical adaptation comes in the form of the nostalgia-drenched BERLIN, BOXHAGENER PLATZ, in which a young boy in 1968 East Berlin helps solve a neighborhood murder mystery.
The two themes meet head on in a pair of suspenseful thrill rides. In director Bettina Oberli’s white-knuckle German-Swiss co-production THE MURDER FARM, a young woman visiting her village from the big city is drawn into an unsolved slaughter years before, while a long-dormant serial killer appears to have struck again even as he lives anonymously among the families of his victims in young writer-director Baran bo Odar’s tense ensemble thriller THE SILENCE.
Another impressive crime drama is Thomas Arslan’s hard-boiled IN THE SHADOWS, in which an ex-con with a knack for precision in both his life and his work finds his world closing in as he plans an armored car heist in Berlin.
Every rule has an exception, and this group’s could well be the surprise German box office hit VINCENT WANTS TO SEA, a deft tragicomedy in which writer-actor Florian David Fitz stars as a Tourette sufferer on a road trip to Italy with his mother’s ashes tucked in his pocket.
There’s something for everyone among these 10 films, reflecting as they do the exciting current times in the German, Austrian and Swiss film industries.
Eddie Cockrell is a film critic and consulting programmer who lives in Sydney, Australia and Wheaton, Maryland.
