It sure is rainy and gray, isn’t it? It sort of makes you want to go to a beautiful theater, eat popcorn and watch German movies. Well, you’re in luck!! On Sunday, Feb. 28, there are not one, not two, not three, but FIVE German movies at the Castro for the inaugural German Gems event. Well, four German movies and one Austrian, but still!! Let’s not quibble.
Ingrid Eggers, who put on the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival at the Goethe-Institut, is the force behind German Gems. She said German films aren’t getting their due.
“In general German films are not so much represented here in the film festival scene, let alone with distribution,” she said. “It’s even worse with Austrian and Swiss films. San Francisco has such a receptive audience, and people should see these films.”
Eggers thinks the films are a nice mix of different aspects of German life and culture. One of the movies, Vision, which has American distribution, tells the story of the nun Hildegard von Bingen.
“She was so far ahead of her time,” Eggers says about the nun who was a composer and wrote about holistic health and female sexuality. “It’s a fabulous portrait of a nun with a feminist edge to it.”
Another historical film is Miss Stinnes, about a a woman who in 1927 set out to circumnavigate the globe by car. Director Erica von Moeller, who will attend the screening, took the footage and made a story out of it.
The Austrian movie, The Bone Man, is a thriller involving a private eye and a restaurant that serves grilled chicken. And other grilled things. Hmmm.
Eggers said the movie reminds her of the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
“With Austrian films, there is always an edge, much more than German ones,” Eggers said. “Maybe they are dark or sarcastic or violent, but there is something edgy.”
There are also two narrative movies, Tender Parasites about two homeless young people who work with seniors, which Eggers calls touching, and Being Mr. Kotschie, about a man having a midlife crisis as he approaches 50. Certainly not a new topic, Eggers said, but she thinks the filmmakers approach it in an interesting way.
“They try to go into the mind and body and head of a man and show through his perception his longing for something he feels he’s missed out on,” she said.
Director Norbert Baumgarten and producer Anke Hartwig will attend the screening of Being Mr. Kotschie, and the producer of Tender Parasites, Juliane Thevissen, will be at the Castro as well.
The times of the screenings are as follows:
Sunday February 28
at the Castro
12 NOON TENDER PARASITES
2 PM MISS STINNES
4:15 PM BEING MR KOTSCHIE
6 – 7 PM Filmmakers Reception
7 PM VISION
9:15 PM THE BONE MAN
Comments