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FILMFEST MÜNCHEN 2018

Public dialogue at the heart of the Munich Film Festival

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- The event’s 36th edition will screen 185 new films hailing from 43 countries, with Emma Thompson and Terry Gilliam set to receive CineMerit Awards

Public dialogue at the heart of the Munich Film Festival
Mackie Messer - Brechts Dreigroschenfilm by Joachim Lang

"The shared movie experience is in danger of being lost. That's why festivals are becoming more and more important as places for coming together and as platforms for discussion" – the words of Diana Iljine, director of the Munich Film Festival, on presenting the 36th edition of this ever-popular event (running 28 June – 7 July). Standing out amongst the themes tackled in this year's programme, which features 220 films, including 185 current films hailing from 43 countries (133 German premieres, 43 world premieres), are surveillance, social horror and, on a lighter note, music. An emphasis has also been placed on the female perspective, not only in the film selections but also in the composition of the juries which, this year, are each comprised of seven women and eight men.

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The opening film, Mackie Messer - Brechts Dreigroschenfilm [+see also:
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, by Bertolt Brecht expert Joachim Lang, starring Lars Eidinger, Tobias Moretti, and Hannah Herzsprung, celebrates the 120th anniversary of the birth of the great German playwright with an adaptation of his Threepenny Opera (named Dreigroschenoper in German, hence the title of the film) which recounts the difficulties experienced by Brecht himself in bringing this production to the stage, and the subsequent resistance of the film industry to see it appear on the big screen.

This film will feature in the crucial competition section, New German Cinema, where the emphasis this year will be on "brutally honest" voices, irrespective of the overall tone of the movie, but also of the subject-matter explored in each movie, which is set to range from historical fact to issues of gender. Among the new films due to screen in this section are The Bees and the Birds [+see also:
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by Lola Randl; Everything Always All the Time [+see also:
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by Philipp Eichholtz; Right Here Right Now [+see also:
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by Jakob Lass, which sees a diverse crowd come together for the final night of a Hamburg club gone bankrupt; Safari – Match Me if You Can [+see also:
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by Rudi Gaul which transposes Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde into the modern-day world of online dating; We Were Just Playing [+see also:
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by Ann-Kristin Reyels, which explores a friendship between two boys representing two separate Europes divided by a border; Linus de Paoli's A Young Man With High Potential [+see also:
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, a psychological study on an individual and product of the Internet age, filmed in English with an international cast, and, last but not least; the coproduction In the Middle of the River [+see also:
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by the American director, Damian John Harper.

The Spotlight section, to be opened by German director Aron Lehmann's The Most Beautiful Girl in the World [+see also:
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, will feature nigh-on 50 fresh and captivating titles from all over the world, some of which have already screened at major festivals. World premieres in this section include Detlev Buck's Asphaltgorillas [+see also:
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, and Klaus Lemke's Bad Girl Avenue [+see also:
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CineVision, the competition devoted to "fresh films directed by fresh talent" includes, among others, Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt's Diamantino [+see also:
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, Bertrand Mandico's The Wild Boys [+see also:
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, Gustav Möller's The Guilty [+see also:
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, and Ali Abbasi's Border [+see also:
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. The CineMasters competition is also rich in high-quality films, such as this year’s Palme d'Or winner, Shoplifters, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Alice Rohrwacher's Cannes-award-winning Happy as Lazzaro [+see also:
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, and Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote [+see also:
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.

Gilliam, to whom Munich is also paying tribute, will receive one of the two CineMerit Lifetime Achievement Awards, with the other going to British actress, screenwriter, and two-time Oscar-winner, Emma Thompson. Philip Gröning, whose earlier films will be shown in addition to his latest work, My Brother's Name is Robert and He Is an Idiot [+see also:
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, will likewise be honoured, while this year's retrospective highlights the work of Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, including her latest film, Zama [+see also:
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, for which she will be present.

Quite a few big names stand out in the New German TV movies sidebar: Dominik Graf (with Hanne), Thomas Stuber (Kruso), Wolfgang Murnberger (Nothing to Lose), Nana Neul (Our Child)… There will be two sections dedicated to TV series: German and International, whilst other parallel sections worth mentioning are: International Independents, the boxing-themed programme Open Air – Rocky and Friends, and the children's film sidebar Kinderfilmfest.

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