60 GERMAN FILMABENDE 1960-2020

60 GERMAN FILMABENDE 1960-2020

In 2020, Goethe-Institut Chennai celebrates its 60th  Anniversary and to commemorate this occasion, Helmut Schippert, Director of Goethe-Institut Chennai has curated a series of 60 German films from 1960 - 2020   that have particularly appealed to him and that have an important relevance to the History of German Films.  These 60 Films will be featured as 60 GERMAN FILMABENDS 1960-2020 for Chennai film buffs.
 
Films by renowned Directors such as Frank Beyer, Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and many others will be featured and the screenings are scheduled almost every Friday and on certain Saturdays throughout the year in 2020.


3.1.2020 | 7.00 pm | Goethe-Institut Auditorium
Naked among Wolves
Director: Frank Beyer, b/w, 124 min.,1962

The first German film devoted to life and death in a concentration camp tells the story of organized resistance in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Set just prior to the liberation of the camp, Naked Among Wolves is the true story of prisoners who risked their lives to hide a small Jewish boy from their captors. The film explores the antifascist’s dilemma of balancing organizational discipline with human values.  

The film is based on Bruno Apitz‘bestseller books of 1958, which has sold more than 3 million worldwide and has been translated into more than 30 languages. In the GDR, Naked among Wolves was part of the school curriculum until 1990 and was used by the GDR leadership for the anti-fascist founding myth: the communist prisoner as a hero.
 
10.1.2020 | 7.00 pm | Goethe-Institut Auditorium
Carbide and Sorrel
Director: Frank Beyer, b/w, 77 min., 1963

In summer 1945, Karl Blucher sets out from Dresden for Wittenberge to try to procure carbide, which is desperately needed for re-starting production in a destroyed cigarette factory. He does get through and could return with seven drums of carbide, if only he had the required means of transport... His journey is quite an adventure. Kalle gets to know Karla, a young peasant woman, falls in love with her (and she with him), yet does not stay with her because his colleagues in Dresden are urgently waiting for the carbide. Soviet officers for alleged profiteering arrest him; he foils US officers, escapes a man-crazy widow, a mined forest, a shipwreck… etc.
 
17.1.2020 | 7.00 pm | Goethe-Institut Auditorium
Divided Heaven
Director: Konrad Wolf, b/w, 110 min., 1965

In this film, shot after the novel of the same name by Christa Wolf, the characters still speak truths that could soon no longer be expressed so openly in the GDR. There was still room for conflict and doubt. One of the most beautiful and saddest love stories that German cinema has ever told. 1961 in Halle, shortly before the construction of the wall: 19-year-old Rita and the ten-year-old Manfred fall in love and move in together, a disparate couple.
 
24.1.2020 | 7.00 pm | Goethe-Institut Auditorium
The Young Törless
Director: Volker Schlöndorff, b/w, 87 min., 1965

At a remote station, young Törless bids his parents farewell. He is going to a boarding school, a large fortress-like building in which the pupils wear dark uniforms and are to be educated to become useful members of society. Törless meets three boys: Beineberg, an intelligent, cold and cynical boy; Reiting, who takes pleasure in tormenting those who are weaker; Basini, a softhearted boy from a not-so-well-off family who becomes the victim. In his film, based on a novel by Robert Musil, Schlöndorff portrays life in a boarding school with which he was familiar from his own school days. He has presented life in the community, with its various forms of domination and suppression, the rites, which no one can infringe and escape unpunished.
 
 
31.1.2020 | 7.00 pm | Goethe-Institut Auditorium
Two among a million
Director: Victor Vicas, b/w, 96 min., 1961
 
Reality was scarce in the cinema of the Adenauer era after the Second World War. One of the few exceptions is this film, inspired by Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague that shows many large-format cityscapes in Berlin in 1961, shortly before the Wall was built .Reality has even overtaken the film: When it came to the cinemas in October 1961, the Berlin Wall was already built. It tells the story of two young people from East Berlin who want to gain a foothold in the West: Kalle, who works the entire day in the East Berlin Central Market and in the evening as a waiter in a West Berlin pub and it brings Christine, who hails from Rostock, across the border into the western sector. The two fall in love and marry. However, the big dreams threaten to collapse…