Background: German Cinema

There was delight when the German film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – only the third German feature film to win one of the main prizes in the Academy Awards' 80-year history. The film's success refocussed international attention on Germany's rich and diverse film landscape.

Serious drama makes a comeback

The Lives of Others is a modern political drama which packs a powerful emotional punch and marks the comeback of serious drama in German cinema. It tells the story of a Stasi officer who is involved in a monitoring operation and falls in love with one of his victims, a well-known actress. He saves her husband from arrest, thus betraying everything that he previously believed in.

'Four Minutes'

Four Minutes (Vier Minuten), directed by Chris Kraus, is the story of an elderly piano teacher and a young woman, Leonie, who is in prison for murder. In this cinematographic tour de force, the embittered teacher and her highly gifted but volatile pupil learn mutual respect and the confidence to shape their own actions. The two leading ladies give stellar performances to a stunning musical score.

April saw the launch of Impossibly yours (Der Liebeswunsch, directed by Thorsten Fischer). When art student Anja cheats on her husband with his best friend, she sets off a catastrophic chain of events, with the other wife fighting to save her marriage. Besides a tragic love story, the film portrays a stifling middle class environment which represses its feelings rather than dealing with them.

The renaissance of the documentary

Into Great Silence (Die Grosse Stille), a film by Philip Gröning about the lives of Carthusian monks in Chartreuse, was the surprise success story of European cinema in 2005 – and the trend is continuing, as the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section at this year's Berlin International Film Festival showed: four out of the 12 entrants were documentaries.

Alfred Holighaus, the head of this section, explains: "To me, this is a logical development. There is an urgent need to show a different reality than that portrayed by the reality TV shows, both in terms of the content selected and the aesthetics. It's also noticeable that the people portrayed are becoming less and less camera-shy, and more and more willing to express their feelings on screen. So we are getting strong statements with emotional directness, which – thanks to modern unobtrusive film-making techniques – can be conveyed with real impact."

'Pool of Princesses'

The hot topic at Perspektive in 2007 was Bettina Blümner's Pool of Princesses (Prinzessinnenbad) about the lives of three young girls in Berlin. Drugs, first love, truanting, sex, life without a father in "problem district" Kreuzberg and the quest for identity in a multicultural community – the film deals with all this and more with unflinching directness. Initially a tip for insiders, the word quickly spread and the public flocked to the screenings. The film finally won the "Dialogue en perspective" award for young directors.

Documentaries proved to be a strong suit among the established directors last year as well: Der Kick (i.e. The Kick) is award-winning director Andres Veiel's account of the true story of two young brothers who murdered a sixteen-year-old boy in Brandenburg, while Sönke Wortmann's Deutschland – ein Sommermärchen (i.e. Germany – A Summer's Tale) – which records the German national football team's 2006 World Cup journey – brought new audience groups into the cinema.

No looking away

'Yella'

German realism remained strong in feature films as well. Besides highly aesthetic stylising, notably in Christian Petzold's Yella, Matthias Luthardt's Pingpong and Stefan Krohmer's Summer '04 (Sommer 04), more naturalistic influences are increasingly coming to the fore. A good example is Valeska Grisebach's film Longing (Sehnsucht), which was made with an entire cast of amateur actors. In a radical departure from his usual gentle comedies for which he is well-known and well-loved as an actor and director, Detlev Buck surprised and impressed audiences and critics alike with Tough Enough (Knallhart), a gritty coming-of-age drama about a young boy who slides into a life of crime. The film portrays the death and violence which are part of daily life in Berlin's tough Neukölln district.

Michael Glaser turned the spotlight on another marginal existence in his film The Free Will (Der freie Wille). This intense psychological study shows a convicted rapist desperately struggling against his urges. Rarely since Fassbinder have human failings been portrayed so uncompromisingly, yet with such touching insight, on German cinema screens. The camera draws viewers directly into the events and confronts them with their fears. There's no looking away.

But life on the margins of society does not always have to end in tragedy: in the enchanting Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon), Andreas Dresen depicts the uneventful lives of two women – an unemployed alcoholic and a geriatric nurse – united in their unerring ability to fall for the wrong man. Poetry, it seems, can develop in the most unpromising circumstances.

Heimat film reinvents itself

Grave Decisions

Heimat film – all yodelling and lederhosen? Think again. The surprise success of the 2006 film year was the touching and endearing Grave Decisions (Wer früher stirbt ist länger tot) by Marcus H. Rosenmüller, which brought a new dimension to Germany's only home-grown film genre. It's a heartwarming tale of an 11-year-old boy in rural Bavaria who is plagued by a guilty conscience: he believes that because his mother died while giving birth to him, he has been condemned to purgatory. Even in Prussian Berlin, audiences were charmed by the lively discussions between our mini-hero and the Virgin Mary, and were moved to tears as he grieved for the mother he never knew.

In his film Hierankl (2003), director Hans Steinbichler showed that Bavaria's deepest abysses are to be found not in the Alps but in the souls of its inhabitants. In his latest film, Winter Journey (Winterreise), he tells the story of a Bavarian businessman who loses his money in a scam originating in Kenya. Determined to get his money back, he travels to Africa. It proves to be a journey of self-discovery.

In Michael Hofmann's Eden, a corpulent, socially awkward chef wins the heart of the woman of his dreams, bringing enchantment into her life and that of her disabled daughter. The director adds a generous helping of black humour and does not shy away from the grotesque – a powerful mix of ingredients which has traditionally been the province of British and Eastern European films.

For lonely hearts, the motorway may offer the only solace: Autopilots (Autopiloten) is Bastian Günther's moving and elegiac feature about four men at different times of life who are in the process of finding themselves. Hailed as the Ruhr's equivalent of Short Cuts, it played to enthusiastic audiences in Berlin.

German films abroad

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Excitement was mounting in anticipation of the German Film Awards on 4 May. Some of the films mentioned here like Four Minutes, Grave Decisions, or The Perfume and Winter Journey undoubtedly won well-deserved accolades. However, the Awards also send out an important signal abroad, with foreign buyers increasingly viewing them as the "quality mark" of German film exports.

But Germany's expanding film export sector is not the only area where things are looking positive: the same can be said of the German film industry overall. Early January saw the launch of the German Film Fund, which will operate alongside existing funding initiatives and will allocate 60 million euros annually to film productions up to 2009.

This funding will also benefit international co-productions if they meet all the criteria and have an active German production partner who is jointly responsible for the film's content. ”It is becoming apparent that with this funding model, we are making partnership with the German film industry even more attractive for international co-productions", says project leader Christine Berg. Things are looking good for German film.