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