For Immediate Release
October 2001
RECENT EXTRAORDINARY FILMS FROM GERMANY
Germany 2001: New Films
November 1–15, 2001The Museum of Modern Art presents Germany 2001: New Films from November 1 to November 15, 2001, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1. This exhibition of recent films from Germany is distinguished by an unusually strong group of films that deal in striking and original ways with many historic and current issues: from the Second World War, through the division of Germany and its Reunification, to contemporary domestic terrorism, the rebuilding of Berlin, and the very real dramas of people trying to cope with the deepest of social changes. Germany 2001: New Films was organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media, in collaboration with the Export-Union of German Cinema (Export-Union des Deutschen Films), Munich.
Mr. Kardish states: "It is astonishing how the German cinema refreshes itself year after year with new talents and compelling works by established filmmakers. What is distinctive about the films in this selection is not only the makers’ interest in truth but their ability to make it compelling, illuminating and, surprisingly, even entertaining."
The program opens with two films by veteran filmmakers: Roland Suso Richter’s highly successful film The Tunnel (2000), the true story of Hasso Herschel, who, having escaped to the West through Berlin’s sewers, spent nine months digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to free his sister; and Jeanine Meerapfel’s Anna’s Summer (2001), about a widow’s return to her family home in Greece. Both filmmakers will be present at each of their film’s first screenings. The program closes with Andrea Weiss and Wieland Speck’s film about Thomas Mann’s two eldest children, Escape to Life (2000), which will have its theatrical release shortly thereafter.
Among the other 18 films featured are Romuald Karmakar’s The Himmler Project (2000), Wilfried Huismann’s Dear Fidel—Marita’s Story (2000), Andres Veiel’s Black Box BRD. (Black Box Germany) (2001), Michael Chauvistré’s To Moscow with IKEA (2001), and two short films, including one that won the Academy Award this year in the category of Best Short Film—Live Action, Florian Gallenberger’s Quiero ser (1999). The program also introduces America to such promising new talent as Achim von Borries (England! 2000), Mirjam Kubescha (Ecce Homo, 2001), Irene Langemann (Lale Andersen—The Voice of Lili Marleen, 2001), and Jobst Oetzmann (The Loneliness of the Crocodiles, 2000), among others. Also of particular interest are the first New York screening of Fred Kelemen’s previously unreleased feature, Frost (1998), and Michael Klier’s strong new melodrama, Heidi M. (2001).
Germany 2001: New Films Screening Schedule
Thursday, November 1 2:00 Mit IKEA nach Moskau (To Moscow with IKEA). 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Michael Chauvistré. With Manuela Geelhaar and Ulf Seemann. On March 22, 2000, IKEA conquered Russia. After a year’s strategizing and campaigning, IKEA convinced Russians that their heavy old furniture was of the past; Muscovites deserved the "new, lighter" furniture that the Swedish retailer could provide. To Moscow with IKEA is the rousing story of the world’s most successful IKEA store as told through the activities of Manuela and Ulf, two loyal employees who met in the company’s Berlin store and were later recruited to open the branch in Russia. As much about the peculiarities of various European cultures as it is about deep social change, this documentary is, depending on which side of the globalization fence the viewer sits, either a joy or a horror. In German and Russian with English subtitles and in English. 94 min.
4:00 Lale Andersen—Die Stimme der Lili Marleen (Lale Andersen—The Voice of Lili Marleen). 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Irene Langemann, based on the diaries of Lale Andersen. During World War II, perhaps the most famous song heard by soldiers on all fronts was "Lili Marleen," composed by Norbert Schultze and sung by Andersen. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, furious that Andersen maintained correspondence with Jewish emigrants in Switzerland, banned her from performing, but military protest was so intense that Andersen was permitted to return to radio and the stage. The song, though, became Andersen’s curse—the singer was forever identified with it. Her voice is still heard today; every night at 10:00 p.m. the song is played to the peacekeepers in Kosovo. In German with English subtitles. 90 min.
6:00 Der Tunnel (The Tunnel). 2000. Germany. Directed by Roland Suso Richter. Written by Johannes W. Betz. With Heino Ferch, Nicolette Krebitz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Sebastian Koch, and Mehmet Kurtulus. The Tunnel tells the true story of Hasso Herschel, a swimming champion from the German Democratic Republic, who, having escaped to the West through Berlin’s sewers, spent nine months digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to free his sister. Directed by Richter, one of Germany’s most prominent young directors, The Tunnel is a gripping and assured adventure, made all the more astonishing by the fact that it actually happened. In German with English subtitles. Filmmaker present on November 1. 150 min.
Friday, November 2
2:30 Der Tunnel (The Tunnel)
6:00 England! 2000. Germany. Written and directed by Achim von Borries. With Ivan Shvedoff, Merab Ninidze, Anna Geislerová, and Chulpan Khamatova. A soulful road movie that begins in Chernobyl and ends in a race against time. Valeri, a member of the decontamination team that was conscripted for the clean-up operation after the nuclear power plant explosion in April 1986, learns ten years later that he is mortally ill. All Valeri wants to do is pick up his buddy Victor in Berlin and go off to England as they had dreamed of doing when they were in the service together. England! is von Borries’s first feature film, and its unusual tone of melancholia inflected with optimism signals a promising new filmmaker. In German with English subtitles. 98 min.
8:00 Anna’s Summer. 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Jeanine Meerapfel. With Angela Molina, Herbert Knaup, Dimitris Katalifos, and Rosana Pastor. In the summer of 2000, a handsome widow, Anna Kastelano, returns to her family home in Thessaloníki, Greece, to arrange the sale of her ancestral property. Before World War II there was a large Sephardic Jewish community on the island; house and garden are replete with memories, and Anna finds herself contemplating her progenitors’ 20th-century biographies. An affecting blend of fact and fiction, Anna’s Summer is a nonlinear memory film that respects the Cabala’s admonition that there is never a beginning or an end. In German, Greek, and Ladino with English subtitles. Filmmaker present on November 2. 107 min.
Saturday, November 3
12:00 Anna’s Summer.
2:00 Lale Andersen—Die Stimme der Lili Marleen (Lale Andersen—The Voice of Lili Marleen)
4:00 Dreckfresser (Dirt for Dinner). 2000. Germany. Written and directed by Branwen Okpako. Sam Meffire, a policeman and the German son of an African father and a mother from the former German Democratic Republic, should have been a symbol of a multicultural and liberal Germany. But the media and German politicians strove so hard to make the case for a "new" Germany on the back of Meffire that he rebelled. He turned criminal, fled to Africa, fell ill, and returned to Germany, where Nigerian-born Okpako found him in prison. Okpako’s graduation film from the Berlin Film and Television Academy, Dreckfresser makes more than a film portrait of this affable and articulate man—it provides a telling sketch of Germany today. In German with English subtitles. 75 min.
Quiero ser. 1999. Germany. Written and directed by Florian Gallenberger. Gallenberger’s graduation film from the Film and Television Academy in Munich, Quiero ser won the Academy Award in March for Best Short Film—Live Action. It tells the tale of two orphan brothers in Mexico who meet after a long separation. In Spanish with English subtitles. 34 min.
Sunday, November 4
12:00 England!
2:00 A Woman and a Half—Hildegard Knef. 2001. Germany. Directed by Clarissa Ruge. Written by Ruge and Matthias Zuber. With Hildegard Knef, Tinta Knef, Paul V. Schnell, David Cameron, and Till Brönner. Born in 1925, Hildegard Knef (a.k.a. Neff) was Germany’s most famous 1950s postwar movie actress. She was a celebrated singer (she played Ninotchka in the Cole Porter musical Silk Stockings for two years on Broadway), and her memoir, The Gift Horse, was an international best-seller that remains one of the most successful books ever published in Germany. Ruge accompanies Knef shipboard across the Atlantic to New York City, where the actress remembers her Manhattan triumph with no particular fondness. Complicated, memorable, and unsentimental, Knef wonders why Ruge wants to accompany her. "All my friends are dead, you see. Are we supposed to tour the cemeteries of the world?" In German with English subtitles. 90 min.
4:00 Frost. 1998. Germany. Written, directed, photographed, edited, and with art direction by Fred Kelemen. With Anna Schmidt, Paul Blumberg, Mario Gericke, Harry Baer, and Isolde Barth. The first American screening of Kelemen’s astonishing, epic road movie. On Christmas night, a young mother escapes from her husband’s drunken abuse with her seven-year-old son. In the hope of finding peace in the countryside of her former East German home, she takes him on a journey across a boundless, frozen landscape. What they find provides neither respite nor solace, and the people who offer help along the way do not do so from altruism. Frost is a rigorous work whose movement is determined by an atmosphere that is at once glacial and overpowering. In German with English subtitles. 203 min.
Monday, November 5
2:00 Lieber Fidel—Marita’s Geschichte (Dear Fidel—Marita’s Story). 2000. Germany. Written and directed by Wilfried Huismann. With Marita Lorenz, Mark Yurasits Lorenz, Monica Mercedes Perez Jiménez, Joe Lorenz, and Harold Austin. A biography that proves truth is stranger than fiction. Marita Lorenz, now a resident of Queens, New York, spent part of her childhood in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. As a young woman she became Fidel Castro’s mistress (then newly risen to power in Cuba), and when she became pregnant he obliged her to have an abortion. Shortly thereafter, the CIA recruited her. Now in her sixties, Lorenz would like to return to Cuba to see Castro. Huismann, a journalist turned documentary filmmaker, uses Lorenz’s attempt to go back to Cuba as the occasion to tell the astonishing story of a woman who counted not only Castro among her friends and acquaintances, but also such notables as Richard Nixon and Lee Harvey Oswald, among others. In German and Spanish with English subtitles and in English. 92 min.
4:00 A Woman and a Half—Hildegard Knef
6:00 Black Box BRD. (Black Box Germany). 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Andres Veiel. A remarkable documentary about an assassination that traumatized the country in 1989. On November 30, only three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alfred Herrhausen, head of the Deutsche Bank and MMB (the large European armaments combine), was killed by a car bomb placed by the clandestine Red Army Faction. Four years earlier Wolfgang Greams, a child of the 1960s who became increasingly radicalized, went underground, and it was assumed that he had become a leader of the faction. Four years after the bombing Greams reappeared, only to be killed in an exchange of gunfire with the police. Black Box Germany examines the divergent paths of Herrhausen and Greams, and through interviews with Herrhausen’s wife and colleagues and Greams’s family and friends, a rich and complex picture of a divided nation emerges. Surfaces deceive and ironies abound. In German with English subtitles. 107 min.
Tuesday, November 6
2:30 Die Einsamkeit der Krokodile (The Loneliness of the Crocodiles). 2000. Germany. Written and directed by Jobst Oetzmann. With Thomas Schmauser, Janek Rieke, Rosemarie Fendel, Julia Jäger, and Ernst Stötzner. A distant cousin investigates the alleged suicide of the son of village butchers, a sensitive young man who took doomed pigs out for night walks. The dead man’s parents are uncomfortable with the attention given to their peculiar late son, but the cousin draws the interest of the most attractive woman in town. As the narrative grows stranger the film becomes even more compelling: secrets are revealed and a macabre humor takes hold. Is this bizarre film a neat murder mystery, a satire on the pettiness of provincial life, a wry comment on German history, or none or all of the above? In German with English subtitles. 97 min.
6:00 Berlin Babylon. 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Hubertus Siegert. With Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn, I. M. Pei, and Günter Behnisch. An impressionistic feature about a city rebuilding itself, Berlin Babylon is Siegert’s first feature-length documentary. Siegert, who before he became a filmmaker earned a degree in landscaping, has written about his film, "The heart of a metropolis had wide swaths of unbuilt space, which, all at once, became expensive development sites. This was the situation in Berlin after the fall of the Wall in 1989. It led to a building boom of Babylonian proportions. A fever that paid little heed to existing structures.... The agoraphobic fear of emptiness elevates the rational business acumen of the Berlin real estate sector to new heights of frenzy." In German with English subtitles. 88 min.
Thursday, November 8
2:00 Frost
6:00 Lieber Fidel—Marita’s Geschichte (Dear Fidel—Marita’s Story)
Friday, November 9
2:30 planet alex. 2000. Germany. Directed by Uli M. Schüppel. Written by Charlotte Wetzel and Schüppel. With Marusha, Marie Zielcke, Nadeshda Brennicke, Baki Davrak, and Ben Becker. "planet alex" is Schüppel’s name for the Berlin Alexanderplatz, the center of the German metropolis where, according to the filmmaker, "countless stories take place. At the same time it’s one of the ‘nonplaces’—one doesn’t especially go there, one just passes by, crosses it." planet alex is about a group of young people who, over a 24-hour period, meet and interact through happenstance. All action takes place at ground level, or a little above or deep below the pulsating urban center known as alex. Schüppel, a veteran of music documentaries, casts DJ techno-queen Marusha as a woman intent on saving Berlin from imminent catastrophe. In German with English subtitles. 102 min.
6:00 Mit IKEA nach Moskau (To Moscow with IKEA)
8:00 Die Einsamkeit der Krokodile (The Loneliness of the Crocodiles)
Saturday, November 10
12:30 Ecce Homo. 2001. Germany. Written, directed, and edited by Mirjam Kubescha. With Pippo Delbono, Mister Puma, Bobò, and Angelo Guerci. A dreamy black-and-white film about a theater company whose members, people who have been marginalized by society, are led by Delbono: "So I went into the streets. . .in the madhouse, and there I found people who seemed happier to me. Maybe because they suffered more. . .and so I asked them for help." Today the troupe travels the world from Moscow to Buenos Aires, bringing "real life" to the stage with its ever-changing performance of Barboni ("bums"). Kubescha, the young filmmaker who is currently working on her thesis film for the Film and Television Academy in Munich, first experienced Delbono’s troupe when she saw Barboni performed in 1998 at the Venice Biennale. Mostly in Italian with English subtitles. 50 min.
2:00 Berlin Is in Germany. 2000. Germany. Written and directed by Hannes Stöhr. With Jörg Schüttauf, Julia Jäger, Edita Malovcic, Tom Jahn, and Valentin Platereanu. Martin, a man in his thirties, is released from a Brandenburg prison after serving 11 years. He went in a citizen of East Germany; a year later the Berlin Wall fell. Now, equipped with a portable television set and worthless East German marks, he must negotiate a new country and an unfamiliar set of social conventions. He searches for family and friends, and what he finds (or doesn’t) makes up the narrative of this finely observed, poignant, and deservedly praised work. Stöhr’s first feature, an elaboration of his thesis film, was one of the most highly regarded German films of the year. In German with English subtitles. 93 min.
5:00 Heidi M. 2001. Germany. Directed by Michael Klier. Written by Karin Åström. With Katrin Saß, Dominique Horwitz, Franziska Troegner, Ulrike Krumbiegel, and Julia Hummer. Klier made one of the most significant feature-length videos of the 1980s—Der Riese (The Giant, 1983), a meditation on electronic surveillance. His most recent work is pure narrative, and while it shares with Der Riese a documentary approach and a delight in detail, Heidi M. is a very different but equally powerful work. In this melodrama, a capable and vivacious Berlin store owner and single mother finds herself becoming romantically involved, but resists. In German with English subtitles. 90 min.
The Films of the Fishes. 2001. Germany. Written and directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms. When the Berlin Film Festival took place at the Zoo Palace, some critics fled the films to see the fish next door. In English. 9 min.
Sunday, November 11
12:00 Berlin Babylon
2:00 planet alex
4:00 Das Himmler-Projekt (The Himmler Project). 2000. Germany. Directed by Romuald Karmakar. The three-and-a-half-hour speech that Heinrich Himmler, Nazi SS Reichführer, gave in the Golden Hall of Poland’s Posen Castle to 92 SS generals in late 1943 has been called "one of the most terrifying documents of the German language" (Joachim C. Fest). The speech is one of 75 that have been transcribed and/or recorded from the many that Himmler gave privately to select groups. Karmakar, one of Germany’s young maverick filmmakers, asked actor Manfred Zapatka to read the entire speech as transcribed from the original sound recording, complete with Himmler’s mistakes in grammar, syntax, and pronunciation. The spoken text is supplemented by subtitles indicating the original reactions of Himmler’s audience. The Himmler Project was shot in one day on videotape with four cameras. As simple as it is, it freezes the blood. In German with English subtitles. 182 min.
Monday, November 12
2:30 Das Himmler-Projekt (The Himmler Project)
6:00 Berlin Is in Germany
Tuesday, November 13
2:30 Black Box BRD. (Black Box Germany)
6:00 Escape to Life—The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (Flucht ins Leben). 2000. Germany/Great Britain. Written and directed by Andrea Weiss and Wieland Speck. With the voices of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, and with Barbara Nüsse, Ulrich Matthes, and Elisabeth Mann Borgese. Erika and Klaus Mann, the brilliant eldest children of Thomas Mann, were so close in childhood that they claimed to be identical twins. Escape to Life follows their flight from Nazi Germany to America where as writers, actors, homosexuals, and pacifists, they expected to find freedom. Speck, a bilingual, German, fiction filmmaker, and Weiss, an expatriate, American, documentary filmmaker, collaborated on Escape to Life because "we felt that by joining forces we [could]...better represent both Erika and Klaus Mann’s committed, political role in history and the interior creative lives of their inspiration." (Print courtesy Cinema Guild, New York). In German with English subtitles and in English. 84 min.
Thursday, November 15
1:00 Dreckfresser (Dirt for Dinner)
Quiero ser
3:00 Heidi M.
The Films of the FishesNote: All programs are subject to change without notice. The public may call 212/708-9480 to confirm schedule.
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