28/04/2006

This week’s new releases include 15 titles, six of which are American, one Chinese, and eight European. As far as German productions are concerned, NFP (Fox) is releasing FC Venus by Ute Wieland, which is not the umpteenth football film ahead of this summer’s World Cup, but rather a simple film about a battle of the sexes.

Pandora is releasing Rendezvous, the debut feature by Alexander Schüler written by playwright Bob L. Sack, a tragic farce about the bad marriage between Anna (Lisa Martinek), who wants a child, and Walter (Sven Walser), who dreams of owning land. Meanwhile, W-Film is distributing Night of the Shorts – Schöne Aussichten, a series of shorts not short on German humour.

This week’s highlight is the simultaneous release of two long awaited Austrian documentaries, which have already attracted attention at festivals. Workingman's Death, an Austrian/German co-production made by Michael Glawogger and distributed by RealFiction, is a series of variations on the theme of physical work. This film, presented in the "Horizons" section at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is appropriately accompanied by We Feed the World, another Austrian documentary, distributed by Delphi Film-Verleih, in which director Erwin Wagenhofer denounces the damage done by the agricultural/food industry in the North to the environment and poor countries.

A third documentary of the week is French/Beninese production Arlit, deuxième Paris by Idrissou Mora-Kpaï, distributed by Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek.

Other new releases yesterday include Spanish film The Secret Life of Words [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile] by Isabel Coixet (see Focus), distributed by Tobis, and the Slovenian romantic comedy Beneath Her Window by Metod Pevec.

(Translated from French)