New German Cinema: A personal top ten

By: kuxa kanema

Lets forget Wenders, lets forget Herzog and even hough it hurts me lets forget about Fassbinder. German cinema has such great treasures in it’s past, but what for the future??? Lets forget about Akin, lets forget about Tykwer and lets forget about Edel. Here are my top ten unknown films and their directors who are contributing to the variety in contemporary German cinema today.

1. Jerichow – Christian Petzold
The dishonorably discharged Afghanistan veteran Thomas returns to his home village of Jerichow. Ali, a local Turkish-German businessman, owner of a snack-bar chain, hires him as a driver. That’s when Thomas meets Laura, his Turkish boss’s young and attractive wife. A classic love triangle is born, unfolding in desolate northeast Germany, where thick forests suddenly end on cliffs overlooking the Baltic Sea. Caught between guilt and freedom, between passion and reason, the protagonists have no hopes for fulfillment of their dreams.

2.Requiem – Hans Christian Schmid
Michaela has spent all her life in a small town in Southern Germany where she has grown up in a deeply religious family. Despite her years-long battle with epilepsy, she yearns to leave home and study at university. At first, everything seems to be going well – her first taste of freedom brings a romantic involvement with Stefan and a rekindling of a friendship with Hanna, who is from the same town. But soon, the shell of family and faith within which she has felt so protected starts to krack. The result is a breakdown.

3. Windows On A Monday – Ulrich Kohler
Köhler’s second film, Windows on Monday (2005) is the story of an attempt to escape family life. Nina (Isabelle Menke) for no explicit reason decides to go awol from her duties as a mother and wife and finds herself in an eery hotel populated by strange people like a former tennis star, actually played by the 1970s tennis enfant terrible Ilie Nastase. In this scene as in others Köhler, who admits to Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s influence, successfully walks a very fine line between subtly comic absurdism and stern realism.

4.Afternoon – Angela Schanalec
Producer/director/screenwriter Angela Schanelec adapts Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull into an existential drama concerning a self-absorbed actress who returns to her lakeside home on the edge of Berlin following an extended absence. It’s been some time since Irene (Schanelek) has seen her family, and after a brief stopover at home she decides to pay a visit to her bigoted brother Alex and her young son Konstantin. Konstantin lives with his uncle Alex, and strives to become a successful writer when he grows up. Before long, Irene also runs into next-door neighbor Agnes, who is currently spending summer break with her parents. Though Irene has recently taken a new lover, everything back home seems strangely stagnant yet decidedly different in a way she simply cannot pinpoint.

5. Vacation – Thomas Arslan
Thomas Arslan’s latest outlines the strained composition of a family and the disintegration of a marriage, set in a luminous Brandenburg summer. The film is confined: the story takes place almost exclusively on the grounds of the mother’s country house and the cinematic language speaks only static shots and long takes. Just at the very end of the film does one see the whole family together. Arslan’s feat reveals the shifting constellations of family members in individual conversations and encounters: the grandmother is tender and wise while alone with granddaughter Laura, cold when Laura’s sister Sophie enters, and bitchy in scenes with her daughter Anna. The story’s tragic irony is the incongruity between the stability of each character’s identity in his or her own mind and the constantly changing roles each actually inhabits.

6. Longing – Valeska Grisebach
Informed by her own meticulous research and a background in documentary filmmaking, Valeska Grisebach’s approach is mirrored in the subtle performances of her largely nonprofessional cast. “Here a glance or a shift of the head can speak volumes, and the piercing melancholy of Markus’ drunken solo dance is easily on a par with Fassbinder or Denis

7. the Forest For the Trees – Maren Ade
Emotional isolation has never felt so completely real on film. Nothing is over-dramatized. No scenery chewing here, Thank God. No dishonest cutaways to a colorful fantasy world inside the main character’s head. No Hollywood situations or developments. What happens throughout feels inevitable, and thus real.

8. Eden – Michael Hofmann
‘Eden’ (…) is ‘one of those movies’ three times over.
It’s one of those… where a brief synopsis will give you no idea what the film is really about.
It’s one of those… that you know soon into the movie will stay with you, a film you will remember… fondly, and with a warm smile, adopt, and cherish.
It’s one of those… with food playing a major role, a film that will send you out to the street in quest of a good restaurant, not just any place.

9. Summer ’04 – Stefan Krohmer
At 40, Miriam radiates serene beauty and tranquility, a confidence and self-assurance as vast as the sea close to her summer home. There are no taboos in the polished, urbane life she shares with her partner André and their 15-year-old son Nils; there is understanding and tolerance. If Nils invites his 12-year-old girlfriend Livia to spend the holidays with them, fine. But when the brazenly sensual Livia begins flirting with an older man, Bill, Miriam feels it is her responsibility to stop the questionable relationship. But as she does so, it is she herself who falls for the shy and charmingly insecure Bill. Miriam forges ahead, seducing him, seeing him secretly. But it is Livia that Bill loves, not Miriam. And suddenly the vast horizons of her life vanish in a fog of jealousy and rejection – emotions that prove to be far less controllable than she thought.

10. Four Minutes – Chris Kraus
Jenny is young but her life is over. She has been locked up in a women’s prison for killing someone, and she would do it again. Buried beneath her impenetrable facade, however, Jenny has an invaluable musical talent. When a 80-year-old piano teacher Traude Krueger discovers the girl’s terrible secret, her raging brutality and her dreams, she makes it her mission to retransform Jenny into the musical wunderkind she once was.

OTHER NOTABLE FILMS FROM THE DIRECTORS ABOVE
Christian Petzold – The State I Am In 2000, Wolfsburg 2003, Ghosts 2005, Yella 2007
Hans Christian Schmid – Crazy 2000, Distant Lights 2003, Storm 2009
Ulrich Kohler – Bungalow, 2002
Angela Schanelec – Passing Summer 2001, Marseilles 2004
Thomas Arslan – A Fine Day 2001, Aus Den Ferne 2006, In the Shadows 2010
Valeska Grisebach – Be My Star 2001
Maren Ade – Everyone Else 2009
Michael Hoffmann – Sophiiiie! 2002
Stefan Krohmer – Sie haben Knut 2003 Mitte 30 2007
Chris Kraus – Shattered Glass 2002

TEN MORE INTERESTING FILMS TO WATCH

1.Nightsongs, Romauld Karmakar, 2004
A flat in Berlin, a woman, a man, their newborn baby – seems like a harmless young family setting, really. But their relationship has become loveless, friends no longer come round as the woman constantly complains about, and all he does is read and write. His parents turn up for a visit, but remain wordless, rushing out of the place after 10 minutes. It’s time to get out of the flat, the woman announces, and decides to go out with a friend- only the start of the night…

2.The Unpolished, Pia Marais, 2007
A 15-year-old girl whose free-spirited parents provide no sense of stability finds the roles between parent and child perpetually shifting in director Pia Marais’s energetic family drama. Stevie’s life is an unpredictable mess — a fact she casually credits to her mother and father’s excessive lifestyle.

3.Madonnas, Maria Speth, 2007
A portrait of Rita, who claims that her mother was never a mother for her. Rita gives birth to her own six children and forces her mother to take the role of a mother for her grandchildren as she never did that for Rita.

4.Milchwald, Christoph Hochhäusler, 2003
This is the story of Sylvia, who looses her stepchildren on a shopping trip in Poland. For fear of loosing her husband’s love, too, she is unable to tell him what has happened and returns home, pretending anything is fine. When realising the missing of his children, the father starts a desperate retrieval. He is ready to give up anything in order to find them. Sylvia supports him in any way; she tries to comfort him and takes care of his hope’s vulnerable flame.

5.Lucy, Henner Winckler, 2006
A young mother struggling to raise her baby daughter finds the weight of responsibility bearing down on her shoulders in director Henner Winckler’s heartfelt tale of love and maturity. Maggy is an eighteen-year old girl who, after giving birth to a baby girl named Lucy, was forced to grow up before her time. Thankfully for Maggy, her mother is always willing to help take care of young Lucy. Though Maggy still lives at home with her mother, it’s obvious that the young girl longs to gain the independence needed to strike out on her own.

6.Ping Pong, Matthias Luthardt, 2006
A family’s crises come to the surface in this drama, the first feature from filmmaker Matthias Luthardt. Stefan (Falk Rockstroh) and Anna (Marion Mitterhammer) are a petit bourgeois couple who live a comfortable if bland existence in the suburbs with their nebbishy son Robert (Clemens Berg), who they all but ignore. One day Stefan and Anna’s teenage nephew Paul (Sebastian Urzendowsky) arrives at their home without warning and announces he’s moving in; since Paul’s father recently committed suicide, his aunt and uncle are not inclined to argue with him.

7.the Free Will, Matthias Glasner, 2006
Theo (Jürgen Vogel) has raped several women and is, after several years of committing acts of sexual violence, caught. He is committed to a psychiatric prison and, after 12 years in prison, he is released to return to normal life. Theo finds work as a printer, goes regularly to therapy, and lives in a supervised group. But Theo finds that finding a normal life isn’t all that easy. Functioning more like a wooden puppet than a person, Theo wanders through his post-prison days more like an inhibited loner with severe difficulties in his social encounters with women.

8.Novemberkind, Christian Schwochow, 2008
A would-be novelist with no ideas of his own mines the tragedies of an unsuspecting woman to his advantage in this drama. Robert (Ulrich Matthes) is a college professor and struggling writer living in Konstanz, a town in Southern Germany. Robert has been working on a novel for years, but beyond a rough idea about life in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, he has no worthwhile ideas and doesn’t have much to show for his efforts; as Robert edges into his mid-forties, he’s begun to worry his literary career will never get off the ground.

9.the Wave, Dennis Gansel, 2008
When Rainer Wegner, a popular high school teacher, finds himself relegated to teaching autocracy as part of the schools project week, hes less than enthusiastic. So are his students, who greet the prospect of studying fascism yet again with apathetic grumbling: The Nazis sucked. We get it. Struck by the teenagers complacency and unwitting arrogance, Rainer devises an unorthodox experiment. But his hastily conceived lesson in social orders and the power of unity soon grows a life of its own.

10.Hotel Very Welcome, Sonja Heiss, 2007
The camera accompanies five “typical” travelers as they search for the life exotic and themselves. Some seek their spiritual center, others the next extreme sporting adventure, the best dope, the nearest open keg and the hippest beach party. “They follow their desires,” says Heiss. “They have hopes and expectations they want fulfilled. But the obstacles that arise are something they can’t calculate. It’s not so much the external limits they come up against but their own, internal ones.”