Filmfest

The 9th festival of German films was held at the lovely Curzon Soho over the weekend. This year there was a particularly impressive selection on offer. I would have gladly gone to nearly all of them, but finances aren’t in good shape at the moment so I had to restrict my choices. I picked the touching opening film Eden, about a “fat chef” who creates dizzying heights of extraordinary cuisine in a spa town in the Black Forest for a woman and her mentally handicapped daughter; the fantastic Winterreise, with a powerful central performance from Josef Bierbierchler as a cantankerous Bavarian manic depressive who falls victim to a money laundering scam and heads off to Kenya to face the culprit head on; the documentary Schattenväter, about the sons of Willy Brandt and Günter Guillaume and how they faced the aftermath of the 1974 spy scandal which forced Brandt’s resignation, forming an interesting companion to Michael Frayn’s excellent play Democracy that ran at the National a couple of years ago; and the closing film Summer In Berlin, an ensemble piece about the lives of two female friends in Prenzlauer Berg.

German film is in pretty good shape these days, as the recent UK successes of Goodbye Lenin, The Edukators, Heimat 3 and Requiem prove. (“We even haff humor in our filmz now”, said the German minister who opened the festival.) However, I am too out of touch to know how appreciated it is in its own land. Over the course of the year I lived in Germany (1993-4) I can recall only two German films being shown in the cinema in Heidelberg – Wim Wenders’ In Weiter Ferne So Nah and Abgeschminkt! – amidst a plethora of dubbed poor American and British releases. I hope that films such as the ones on offer over the weekend have at least received a wider distribution at home, even if they aren’t taken up in the UK.

And therein lies the point of film festivals; the chance to see quality film making first hand, to get exposure to films which sadly run the risk of being left up on a studio’s shelf because distributors see them as too obscure and too clever for the mainstream popcorn-crunching chav audiences littering our screens today. They also afford the opportunity to meet the directors and performers and engage in lively debate about the issues their work has raised. I’ve never been very good at organising myself to get to the London Film Festival and this ineptitude of mine angers me every year. Even though I inevitably get to see the frontrunners on general release later, I always regret missing the chance to discover more about the background of a particular film. The London Film Festival represents the classic London conundrum – there’s too much choice. I can never decide which films I want to go to most, and I can’t afford or spare the time to go to them all, so I end up going to none whatsoever. The same as when you read Time Out and see the glamorous action-packed life you should be leading in our great metropolis, when the reality is that you spend your days stuck nose-to-armpit on clanking tube trains and in stuffy offices meeting the demands of others, and your evenings trying to catch up on laundry and washing up before passing out in front of reality TV shite as you’re too brain-dead to indulge in anything more intellectually challenging.

REBECCA

Back to Barn Hill

On Saturday afternoon, Dave and I finally completed the Capital Ring, our 75-mile trek around the greener outskirts of London which we started back in May. We’d intended to finish a long time before this, but free days at weekends seemed to become sparse as we got embroiled in flat redecoration and trips to Canada.

Saturday dawned with glorious weather and miraculously free of engineering works on any of the Tube lines we needed so it was the perfect day. We headed out to Greenford on the Central Line and then found that we seemed to have left the hilliest part of the walk until last, as we climbed through Paradise Fields up Horsenden Hill, up to Harrow school and down across its rugby pitches, through Preston Park and then back up to Barn Hill, overlooking the City and the everlasting building site of Wembley Stadium. We felt pretty proud of ourselves as we sat on a bench at the viewpoint beside a pond, surveying the conurbation beneath us. The Capital Ring is not a difficult walk, but it’s taken a reasonable degree of commitment to get all the way around it.

Like all of London, the Capital Ring embraces contrasts. You see some of the most opulent (Richmond) and some of the most squalid (Hackney Wick) parts of the city suburbs. There are palaces (Syon House, Eltham) and sewers (the Greenway). There are streams, canals and rivers, forests, woods, parks and open meadows. There is the world’s ugliest hospital (Ealing). There is a windmill (Wimbledon). There are cranes, swans, ducks, coots, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, woodpeckers, jays and rutting deer. There is dogshit (Crouch End’s Parkland Walk). Some areas are undergoing rapid change and construction, such as the Docklands and 2012 Olympic Park to be. Some are undergoing painfully slow change and construction (Wembley and, if I think about it, the 2012 Olympic Park to be).

It’s quite surprising to find ourselves still in London so late in the year. Dave still has job applications pending, and I’m currently very in and out of work and needing to make a significant improvement to my level of income. Subtitling in the UK is finally dying a dismal death, as our rates have been cut by 25-40% in the last 12 months and the work is increasingly being sourced out to India, Kenya and Malaysia, so that London-based companies have a chance of keeping up in the ridiculous price war our Burbank clients have initiated. Quality of output has plummeted but no one but the subtitlers seems to care.

Despite having had several subtitling-free days since September, I haven’t found the time to blog. Or the time to brush up my German or write that novel or do anything else of note. I have done a lot of painting – and that’s emulsion on walls, not watercolours on parchment. It’s amazing how when you have infinite time to do all those things you think you’d do if you didn’t have to work, you achieve precisely nothing.

REBECCA