Director: Frauke Finsterwalder, colour, 95 Min., 2013
We are happy to invite you to the next installment of the ArtHouse Cinema program on Tuesday, the 10th of May 2016. This time we will screen the film called
Finsterworld directed by
Frauke Finsterwalder.
Finsterworld is set in a Germany that has seemingly been plucked out of time. A land where the sun always shines, children wear school uniforms, policemen dress up as bears and pedicurists make biscuits for old ladies. However, an abyss lurks beneath this beautiful facade – and the film goes on a journey to its depths.
In five narrative strands, presented in the whimsically inviting guise of a light-hearted character comedy, the film explores the uncharted territory between innocence and perversion, kindness and barbarity, triviality and pathos, and does so with great aplomb: a sixth-form trip to a former concentration camp led by dedicated teacher Nickel (Christoph Bach), the relationship problems of a policeman (Ronald Zehrfeld) and a frustrated documentary filmmaker (Sandra Hüller), the romance between a pedicurist (Michael Maertens) and a woman in a retirement home (Margit Carstensen), the tale of a hermit living in a forest (Johannes Krisch) who is rearing a baby raven, and the car journey of a wealthy and rather snobby couple in their mid-fifties (Corinna Harfouch and Bernhard Schütz), whose son is on the school trip mentioned above (his grandmother is also the lady in the retirement home). Even the light is perfectly adjusted to each of these episodes – sometimes it has a matt, flat finish as it falls onto the leather cushions of a limousine, sometimes it glistens over a blooming field of rapeseed, and other times it takes on a dusty-retro quality as it shines through the tattered curtains in the retirement home when the pedicurist declares his love for his client.
The individual sequences are intertwined in an unsettling web, and the dialogue pierces through the sensitivities of our society and our age like knife stabs. As if caught in a never-ending spiral, the characters spin about and around each other until they reach the dramatic climax that no one wanted or anticipated, but which has, in retrospect, a beguilingly inevitable quality.
Arthouse Cinema
Arthouse Cinema is the regular film program of the Goethe-Institut in Indonesia. Every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month we screen independent movies, avant-garde movies, retrospectives, experimental films or documentary films from Europe and Indonesia – anything but the mainstream.
Back
