News

A 17-year-old German girl working part-time as an office cleaner has a love-hate rapport with one of the Muslim employees in Strange Daughter (Fremde Tochter), the sophomore feature from filmmaker Stephan Lacant. As in his previous film, the queer policemen romance Free Fall, the writer-director excels at suggesting the emotional intensity and the more rational confusion surrounding the unlikely rapport between two people who appear to be polar opposites, though here the impressive and intense first part slowly morphs into a film in which the plot seems to take precedence over any kind of psychological illumination. Nonetheless, this is the...

The upcoming Filmfest Munich just announced 20 exciting world premieres for their New German Cinema strand. Highlights include Fremde Tochter by Stephan Lacant with Elisa Schlott and Heike Makatsch, Detour by Nina Vukovic with Luise Heyer and Lars Rudolph, Luna by Khaled Kaissar with Lisa Vicari, Branko Tomovic and Bibiana Beglau, Lomo - The Language of Many Others by Julia Langhof with Jonas Dassler and Lucie Hollmann and many more exciting movies from young and established German filmmakers. "Do You Sometimes Feel Burned Out and Empty?" The films of the New German Cinema sidebar ask us probing questions about our self-image, self-improvement and other's perception of us, which informs not just Lola Randl's film of that name starring Charly Hübner and Benno Fürmann, but all...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Germany has a long and trivia-crazy history with the Oscars that didn’t just begin with Sandra Bullock speaking German in her Blind Side acceptance speech or Christoph Waltz, an Austrian-German talent winning two Tarantino-Flavored Oscars for multi-lingual performances. We’ll get to more trivia in a minute but first the German shortlist. We await their choice for Oscar’s Foreign Language Film submission with curiousity because they’re always a threat for the eventual shortlist. Germany has received 18 nominations and 3 wins over the years. They’re weighing the quality of nine different pictures before deciding. Which will they send our way?

The finalists are…

My Beautiful Country Michaela Kezele

This one skews international - a romance between a young Serbian widow and an Albanian soldier The German Friend Jeanine Meerapfel

A coproduction with Argentina Free Fall Stephan Lacant

A gay romantic drama about two cops The Girl With Nine...

Rural Russian film takes top prize at Poland’s New Horizons International Film Festival.

Russian director Alexander Fedorchenko’s Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari received the Grand Prix and a €20,000 ($27,000) cash prize at the 13th New Horizons International Film Festival (July 18-28) in Wroclaw.

The decision by the International jury, headed by Hungary’s Bela Tarr and including Polish film-maker Joanna Kos-Krauze and Berlinale Forum director Christoph Terhechte, was announced ahead of the Polish premiere of Malgorzata Szumowska’s In The Name Of on Saturday evening.

Fedorchenko’s film had its world premiere at last year’s Rome Film Festival.

Review: Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari

In June, it won three awards - best script, best cinematography and the Prize of the Russian Guild of Film Scholars and Film Critics - at the Kinotavr “Open Russian” Film Festival in Sochi.

The $2m production by Fedorchenko’s 29 February Film Company explores the myths of the Russian...

The distributor has picked up four films from Frameline 37 – San Francisco International Lgbt Film Festival, which ended on Jun 30.

The haul includes North American rights to Bruno Barreto’s Reaching For The Moon, winner of Frameline’s Audience Award, Yen Tan’s Pit Stop [pictured] and Stephan Lacant’s Free Fall.

Wolfe took worldwide rights excluding the UK, France and Germany to Chris Mason Johnson’s Test.

“These are four of the best Lgbt movies of the year,” said Wolfe president Maria Lynn. “Reaching For The Moon is an exquisite English-language production depicting the Brazilian heyday of Pulitzer Prize-winning lesbian poet Elizabeth Bishop.

“Test is an astute and beautiful drama about a young modern dancer navigating gay life in San Francisco during the early days of the AIDS crisis [and] Free Fall has been called the German Brokeback for its deeply moving portrayal of a German policeman who unexpectedly begins to fall in love with a fellow male officer...

In 1979, Adrienne Mancia together with Larry Kardish curated the first program of Kino!, new German cinema at New York's Museum of Modern Art. For 34 consecutive years, Larry Kardish, distinguished Senior Film Curator at MoMA, presented work by celebrated international filmmakers including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Rosa von Praunheim, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Wolf Gremm, Wolfgang Becker, Doris Dörrie, Andreas Dresen, to Christian Petzold, and many others to enthusiastic audiences.

For 2013, Kino! continues, now organised by Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, MoMA, with Nicole Kaufmann, Project Co-ordinator, German Films Service + Marketing (Munich) and its New York representative, Oliver Mahrdt (read our interviews with them, here).

Here is the 35th edition lineup of reinvention with filmmakers Stephan Lacant, Nico Sommer, Laura Mahlberg, Andreas Bolm, and Jan Ole Gerstner in attendance to present their work and participate in Q&As.

Free...