A film by Martin Farkas. In german.
Hundreds of Demmin residents killed themselves in 1945 due to their fear of the Russians. The topic could not be discussed in the GDR, today it is used as propaganda by fascists.
Credits:
Deutschland 2017, 90 min
Regie: Martin Farkas
Drehbuch: Jens Stubenrauch, Petra Felber, Barbara Denz, Martin Farkas
Kamera: Roman Schauerte
Schnitt: Jörg Hauschild, Catrin Vogt
Musik: Mathis Nitschke
Termine:
A film by Joachim Trier. In norwegan with german subtitles.
«THELMA is seductive and musical in tone and structure, with a more exploratory visual language than Joachim Trier’s earlier features that were more focused on dialogue and expressed a greater self-discipline visually. THELMA is more like his shorts, but obviously more temperate coming from his artistic maturity, experience and techniques. Zeitgeist is replaced by timelessness, chamber music by a symphony. The systematically unpredictable THELMA is the director’s most complete, lyrical and transcending film. »
– Dag Sødholdt (Excerpt from Montages.no)
Joachim Trier’s first step into the genre film area is about the title character Thelma, a young woman who moves away from her religious family on the west coast of Norway to study in Oslo. Upon meeting fellow student Anja hidden feelings surface in Thelma, and after several inexplicable seizures she realizes that she is possessed by something supernatural – that might have terrifying consequences. THELMA is a poetic piece that embraces several impulses, genres and moods and is a major step onwards for Joachim Trier as a filmmaker.
A film by Andrei Zvyagintsev. In russian with german subtitles.
In Moscow, at the end of the school day, students are departing on their way home. One twelve year old boy, Alexey, decides to take an indirect path home rather than using the regular city streets. Alexey takes a path which leads him to walk by a local river in a wooded area just on the outskirts of town. He appears to be in no particular rush to get home. His parents, Zhenya and Boris, are in the midst of obtaining a divorce, with much animosity. They are portrayed as having divergent and incompatible personalities. Both are trying to form new lives in new relationships.
One day, it is discovered that the boy has disappeared from home, and his mother calls the police for assistance. At first, the police see this as the simple case of a runaway child and expect the boy to return home within a day or two. However, when Alexey does not return, a volunteer group specializing in the search for missing persons takes over the case and promptly initiates a preliminary search for the boy by sending the parents to estranged relatives in the hope of locating him. They are first sent to see if Alexey is at his mother’s parents. Alexey is not there when they arrive, though their trip to visit her mother out of town is punctuated by tension between the estranged relatives and Boris is verbally berated and excoriated by Zhenya. On the return trip home, her verbal abuse escalates to the point that Boris discharges her on the rural roadway before they get back to town.
The failure of the police to find Alexey promptly escalates the search for him into an all out emergency missing persons search across the town and surrounding areas. A search of an abandoned municipal building from an old dilapidated city development project where Alexey was known to have visited turns up nothing. Finally, the parents are asked to come to the morgue to examine and try to identify the remains of a John Doe child of still unknown identity. The parents both deny that the disfigured dead child’s body is their son, though the experience of being put through the identification process is emotionally traumatic to them as they breakdown in tears of desperation, with Alexey still missing.
Later, Alexey’s mother has sold their apartment and workers begin dismantling wall hangings and appliances left behind in the now vacant apartment. Outside on the street, missing person posters of Alexey now canvas large parts of the city trying to seek help in locating the missing boy. The scene shifts to the nearby river by the wooded path which Alexey used to use to walk home after school and the view focuses on an extended landscape scene looking through naked winter branches of the surrounding very tall trees. The tree branches sway slightly against the winter sky with no sight of Alexey or anyone else among the naked winter branches.
A film by Taylor Sheridan. In english with german subtitles.
A blank spot on the map, rugged and relentless. The winters here in Wyoming are especially tough, with temperatures going down to the minus double digits. When you run outside in the wilderness, your lungs might burst. That‘s what seemed to have happened to a young woman who is discovered in the snow by hunter and tracker Cory Lambert. Her body isn‘t just lying anywhere, but on the edge of the Arapaho and Shoshone Native American reservation Wind River and the victim is also Arapaho. That makes the case unimportant to the state police. The Native American authorities should deal with it. Young FBI agent Jane Banner is sent there from her training site in Las Vegas 800 kilometers away. It starts out as a formality, but the more she founds out about the conditions on the reservation, the more she feels it is her duty to solve the case. With the help of Cory who is more involved in the case than she first thinks, she searches for traces to find out what happened that night.
In the Native American reservation countless young woman die and disappear every day and their cases remain unsolved. Taylor Sheridan, the prize-winning screenwriter of films like SICARIO and HELL OR HIGH WATER, dedicates his directorial debut to them. WIND RIVER is a devastating study in loss, a keenly observed sociogram, and a nerve-racking thriller. The indie film is carried by Jeremy Renner‘s sensitive portrayal of Cory. The powerful images of the relentless landscape and the score by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave round out Sheridan‘s film and make it a film that sticks with you long after it‘s over.
Lars Tunçay | indiekino.de, Translation: Elinor Lewy
A film by Paul Thomas Anderson. In english with german subtitles.
Fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is the total package. He has the same perfectionism when he works on his creations, goes to the bathroom, and has his breakfast. Watching Reynolds Woodcack have his breakfast means being witness to a longstanding, finely calibrated routine that is fullyoriented towards the needs of the sensitive genius. Every discordant note, every triviality, could break off his creative flow.
PHANTOM THREAD is set in 1950s England, which is more of an aesthetic idea for Paul Thomas Anderson than anything else. The director of PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE and THE MASTER shows a haute couture kingdom with opulent images which Reynolds is in charge of. Everything here is exquisite: the colors, the textures, the materials, the tapestry, the double doors, the lapsang souchong that is served at breakfast. The tailors who enter the feudal House of Woodcock through the servent entrance every morning are the loyal lieges, and Reynold‘s sister Cyril (Leslie Manville) is the high commander. The master‘s lovers play a subordinate role and are replaced when they start bothering him. This changes when Reynolds meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a young eastern European immigrant. She becomes his model and his lover, and unlike her predecessors, she manages to carve an indispensable place in the master‘s world.
Anderson tells a complex, fetishistic love story where secret obsessions are woven in like hidden messages in the hem of a dress. Alma and Reynolds are in a love triangle from the start – Reynolds creations are the third person. Instead of a first sex scene there‘s a fitting, a ritualistic measuring where both know what it means. Being dressed and having someone dress you becomes an erotic act. Alma says“I can stand for hours“ and “I‘m beautiful in his dresses,“ and Reynolds watches her catwalk with the eyes of a lover. This idyll does show ruptures when it becomes clear that Alma is her own person and she disrupts the iron rules of the House of Woodcock. Instead of respecting the holy serenity of the breakfast ritual, she joyfully makes noise and pours the tea from too high up, which makes a disruptive sound. When Reynolds runs off insulted, she says some blasphemous words to Cyril: “I think he‘s too sensitive!“
THE PHANTOM THREAD is a multifaceted, iradescent film. A hymnal-hedonistic celebration of color, form, and style. An ironically amusing portrait of narcissistic masculinitiy. The construction and deconstruction of a genius. But most of all, THE PHANTOM THREAD is a gothic romance, an exuberant love story with morbid aspects filled with psychological chasms. These chasms are what make the dissimilar couple find a kind of balance. The fantasy of psychologically sound model partners that always communicate respectfully with “I feel“ messages is countered here with a couple in love who seem to follow their own, possibility perverse-seeming rules and manage to make it work, held together by a thread invisible to everyone else, the PHANTOM THREAD.
Hendrike Bake, Translation: Elinor Lewy
A film by Carlotta Kittel. In german.
HE SHE I is a film about the power to tell your own story, and the powerlessness to prevent a second version of it – a conversation that never happened. A film about a family that never was a family.
D 2017, 88 Min.
Regie: Carlotta Kittel
Kamera: Andac Karabeyoglu
Schnitt: Andrea Herda Muñoz, Carlotta Kittel
Trailer ER SIE ICH from Carlotta Kittel on Vimeo.
A Film by Sean Baker. In english with german subtitles.
Colourful souvenir shops and shabby motels with promising names line a suburb of the perhaps happiest place in the world: Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida. At the „Magic Castle Inn”, is where Mooney lives. The smart six-year-old girl and her friends Scootey and Jancey hang around the neighbourhood all day begging for ice cream and getting mixed up in all kinds of mischief. Little does she understand the worries of her mother Halley, who recently lost her job as a stripper and has no way of paying the 35-dollar-a-week rent. If worst comes to the worst, their last hope lies in the generosity of the stern yet equally kind-hearted motel owner Bobby… Director Sean Baker once again captures the American subculture with sensitivity and incredible vivacity. One of the most celebrated films of the year.
mit: Willem Dafoe
Brooklynn Prince
Valeria Cotto
Bria Vinaite
Christopher Rivera
Termine:
A film by Makoto Shinkai. In japanses with german subtitles.
Taki and Mitsuha, one day find that their sleep brings their body swap and the two start communicating by memo. As they awkwardly overcome one challenge after another, a bond develops between the two- one that evolves into something more romantic.
A film by Charles Burnett. In english with german subtitles.
Stan lives with his wife and daughter in the Watts district of Los Angeles. He is a sensitive dreamer who seeks refuge from harsh reality in his family life. His tormenting job at a slaughterhouse, where he disembowels dead sheep, visibly takes it toll on him, and he isolates himself from the community.
Charles Burnett’s thesis film at UCLA, shot on weekends in 1977 for pocket change, is one of the unseen masterworks of American film history. It has been compared to Italian Neo-realism because of its rough, empathetic documentary quality; others see the influence of Cassavetes’s „Shadows”, while Burnett himself names Jean Renoir as his role model. In 1981 the Forum introduced the film to an international audience; in 1990 it was named one of the 50 titles in the „National Film Registry” at the Library of Congress. To date, however, unsettled issues related to music rights have kept the film out of distribution. Restored in 35mm by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Killer of Sheep can now be seen on the screen again, three decades after its creation. The film remains inspiring – every grainy black-and-white shot contains so much affection, so much authenticity, so much poetry and dedication.
Christoph Terhechte
Forumsblatt
Credits:
USA 1977, 83 Min., engl. OmU, schwarzweiss
Buch, Kamera, Schnitt, Produktion: Charles Burnett
Darsteller: Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Jack Drummond
Termine:
A film by Karin Jurschick.
Why is the life of a fire-fighter who died a hero in the Twin Towers on September 11 worth on average a million dollars less than that of a stockbroker who lost his life in the same disaster? How much money should oil giant BP pay the countless fishermen on the Gulf of Mexico who are fighting for their livelihoods in the wake of the largest oil spill in history? How can hundreds of ailing Vietnam vets be compensated for their suffering, which stems from exposure to Agent Orange? How can hundred thousands of retirees who depend on a small pension be compensated if the pension fund they trusted in failed due to mismanagement? These are questions that almost appear cynical, but not for America’s most famous compensation specialist: Ken Feinberg.
Shortly after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the US Congress created a fund to compensate all victims who agreed not to go to court. ONE man was appointed to have sole responsibility for deciding how much compensation was to be received by people according to their individual circumstances: Ken Feinberg. He offered to meet all victims or their families personally. However, his calculation model caused uproar among many of them who felt that the value of their lost loved ones could never be compensated with money.
In 1984 the Agent Orange case made Feinberg a household name overnight: 250,000 Vietnam veterans who sprayed the toxic defoliant over the jungle and who later suffered from severe diseases sued the chemical companies that had produced this substance. Feinberg managed to negotiate an out-of-court settlement.
However, it was the 9⁄11 compensation fund that truly made him a star. Since then, hardly a national tragedy has befallen the USA without Feinberg being called upon to play his part. We will focus on a selection of his major cases: Agent Orange, 9⁄11, the Wall Street crash, the BP oil catastrophe and a new one: the imminent cuts in the Central States Pension Fund.
All of them are not only turning points in US history, but also ask troubling questions for all of us, worldwide.
PLAYING GOD is more than just the story of a controversial man who at times seems virtually omnipotent: What happens within our Western system of values when economic interests and people’s lives become intertwined through tragedy?
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