24/03/2011

In this week’s low-key line-up, the only new German title, Sasha, is distributed by Salzgeber, a company specialised in auteur films whose recent releases include Sébastien Lifshitz’s Going South [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (last December) and João Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die Like a Man [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (in early February 2011).

Sasha [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is by Yugoslavian-born German director Dennis Todorovic, who trained in England, on the job in Prague, in Cologne and at the Andrzej Wajda Film School in Warsaw. In this emotional story, he looks again at the cultural gap (between his characters’ Montenegrin roots and their German life) previously explored in his short film Love of Fate (presented at Locarno in 2006).

This debut feature, developed by Todorovic at the Sarajevo and Berlinale Talent Campuses, centres on the procrastinations of a young pianist, Sasha (Sascha Kekez). Settled in Cologne for the past 20 years, his family is heavily influenced by traditional Montenegrin values.

Caught between a male chauvinist father who has already planned his future back in the homeland and a depressive mother who projects all her dreams onto her son, Sasha finds it hard to express his feelings for his piano teacher (Tim Bergmann). However, the situation gathers pace, with typically Eastern European quirky humour, and the young man has to make some decisions.

Sasha was produced by Ewa Borowski for Cologne-based Eastart Pictures, which was co-founded by her and Todorovic.

This week’s other European release is François Ozon’s French film Potiche [+see also:
trailer
film profile], starring Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu (distributed by Concorde).

(Translated from French)