German Gems 2012

2012 has welcomed in another edition of the German Gems film festival at the Castro Theater in San Francisco.
This year I opted to partake of one film:

Uber uns das All (roughly 'Over us the Sky')

This film, Director+Writer Jan Schomburg's first feature (!) is an investigation into the nature of romantic relationships. What we make of them, what we will do for them, what we will allow to happen for the sake of them. Martha, the main character is set to join her successful Medical Research husband in Marseilles where he accepts a foreign research/teaching post. Inexplicably, he commits suicide soon after he arrives. In what ensues, Martha finds out that he never was a Medical Researcher, a lie that had been going on daily for 4 years and that he may have been having a secret affair with her best friend..
In the shock of all of this Martha, consciously or not, seeks to find a replacement for her lost husband. She finds him in the person of a professor of German history who after numerous shocks over the situation, apparently acquiesces and they form a new life together...

It is a puzzling movie. Free from 'big studio' demands for tidy stories, many important issues such as 'well what was her deceased husband ACTUALLY doing anyway ?' are left completely unanswered. The movie is pleasingly vague and we're left with trying our best to live in Martha's head as the tale unfolds.

The after movie Q&A session with the Director/Writer/Producer was most interesting. Questions about 'what happened that we didn't see' were met in the spirit of: 'we both saw the movie, you know as much as I' (ha ha.. very good !).
It turns out that Georg Friedrich who played the character of the history teacher is usually typecast in mainstream German movies as a bad, tough character. The interviewer mentioned that Friedrich is usually 'the bad Austrian' (I'm not sure what that means culturally speaking !). The director said that after Friedrich read the script 'he (Friedrich) was in tears that someone actually wanted him to portray a history professor' :-)

Nice experience German Gems. Thanks for another great festival !

German Gems 2011

Bummed that I've missed 2 years of the San Francisco 'Berlin and Beyond' German Film Festival

http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/saf/prj/bby/enindex.htm

I was excited to see that another film festival 'German Gems' was on screen this weekend in SF.

http://germangems.com/

I caught a film each on Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday's film 'The Architect' was the unfolding over a disasterous weekend of a highly dysfunctional family coming to terms with itself. The sordid details of the situation would have made for an hour plus of grimacing and squirming if not for the liberal application of humor throughout. Recommended viewing !

Sunday's film 'Celebration of Flight' is a documentary centered around a (then) 78 year old retired pilot's dream of building and flying his own airplane. On the surface, not an unusual story. What makes this case so special is the magnetic personality of David (the pilot), and the fact that he was building this plane in the garage of the house that he built on a hill in the middle of the tropics of the Dominican Republic. His friendships with the people of the Island are quite an uplifting affirmation of life. During the Q&A, it came up that the filmaker sacrificed quite a bit the making of her self-financed film which took many years to complete. Happily, she reported that she got Clint Eastwood to see the film and as a result may get some backing to create another feature film about the life of David. From the glimpses of that life that we got this afternoon from the film and the Q&A session, a film about his life adventures would make an engrossing movie indeed.