A Potpourri of Vestiges Feature
The
German Embassy in collaboration with the India Habitat Centre is hosting a film
festival with focus on the city of Berlin from April 7 - 18, 2022. As part of
the festival, eight films are being screened at the India Habitat Centre, each
of them portraying the city of Berlin from a different angle. In addition to
co-curating the festival, I am also introducing each of the eight films before
their respective screenings at the festival.
What makes this festival
unique that here we are not just celebrating a director or a particular
filmmaking style. What we are celebrating here is a city that has been captured
by countless amazing film makers over the last century. The aim of the festival
is to display a variety of films about Berlin, while covering a maximum of
different directors and periods. So, other than celebrating its history and its
culture, we are also celebrating all those filmmakers and their styles through
the festival.
The opening film of the
festival is the 2015 documentary about Berlin’s vibrant post-punk underground
scene titled ‘B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989’. So we start
with the Berlin of the 1970s and 80s at the height of the Cold War. Here is a
fascinating documentary about Berlin’s vibrant post-punk underground scene
titled ‘B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989. B-Movie is
basically told through the eyes of British musician Mark Reeder who shifts to Berlin
from Manchester in the year 1979 and goes on to become a key player in the
city's underground scene, working as a concert promoter and sound engineer.
B-Movie is directed by a
trio of TV-trained directors including Klaus Maeck, who is a frequent collaborator
of the famed German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin. Now the amazing part about
this documentary is how it blends archive footage (home movies, super 8 film
footage, etc.) with some cleverly staged reenactments making it a very
interesting work. You will find some power visuals of the Berlin Wall in the
documentary. There are snippets of David Bowie, Joy Division, Sex Pistols,
Tangerine Dream, and others. Also, there is Nick Cave, Tilda Swinton, Keith
Haring, and New Order, among others.
With the second film, the
festival takes you back in time to the Berlin of the Roaring 20s with Walter
Ruttmann's 1927 silent era masterpiece ‘Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis’. It
is essentially an emblematic ‘city symphony’ film structured to follow the life
of Berlin as well as its inhabitants across the course of a single day, from
dawn to dusk.
Leander Haußmann’s comedy
film ‘Sonnenallee,’ which follows a group of kids growing up in East Berlin in
the late 1970s, is the third film on the festival lineup, which is to be
screened on April 9. The fourth film on the lineup, to be screened on April 10,
is Wim Wender’s 1987 masterpiece ‘Wings of Desire’ about invisible, immortal
angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of its human inhabitants,
comforting the distressed. Wings of Desire which won him the Best Director
award at Cannes. The film was remade by Hollywood as City of Angels (1998) with
Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan.
The next film on the lineup
is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 Oscar-winning drama ‘Das Leben Der
Anderen’ (The Lives of Others), which will be screened on April 12. Set in 1984
East Berlin, it follows an agent of East Germany’s secret police who, while conducting
surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself increasingly
absorbed by their lives.
Wolfgang Becker’s 2003
tragicomedy film ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ will
be screened on April 15. Set in East
Berlin between October 1989 (a few days before the Berlin Wall came down) and
October 1990 (a few days after German reunification ), the film follows a young
man who attempts to protect his fragile mother - a passionate communist - from
a fatal shock after she comes out of a long coma. He does so by concealing from
her the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in East Germany.
The Bollywood film Door Ke Darshan (2020) is said to have been inspired by ‘Good
Bye Lenin!’
The second last film on the
lineup, to be screened on April16, is Tom Tykwer’s 1998 blockbuster ‘Run Lola
Run’. The experimental thriller follows Lola who has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks to save her
boyfriend’s life after a botched
money delivery. The Netflix film Looop Lapeta (2022) is an official remake of ‘Run
Lola Run’.
The
festival comes to a close on April 18 with Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 critically
acclaimed ‘Victoria’—a crime thriller shot in a single continuous take which
follows a young Spanish woman who meets four local Berliners outside a
nightclub; but what starts as an exciting adventure quickly turns into a
nightmare.
(To access the complete schedule of the
Berlin Film Festival, visit: www.habitatworld.com/events-update. Entry is Free)
A version of this review was first published at The Daily Guardian.
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