18/06/2010

This is a quiet season for distributors. This week, only seven new releases are hitting German screens, including four European titles.

First up is a family film based on Enid Blyton’s series of novels: Hanni and Nanni [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the debut big-screen feature by television director Christine Hartmann. Produced by UFA Cinema and Gesellschaft Für Feine Filme, the film centres on two young twin sisters who arrive at a new boarding school.

Adult cast members include Hannelore Elsner, Heino Ferch, Katharina Thalbach and Anja Kling. The film is being released by Universal in both Germany and Austria.

German audiences will also get the chance to discover Claudia Schmid’s biographical documentary Die Stille der Unschuld - Der Künstler Gottfried Helnwein (“The Silence of Innocence: The Artist Gottfried Helnwein, distributed by MFA); Gerardo Olivares’s Spanish film 14 Kilometers [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (distribution: Kairos); and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s UK title Five Minutes of Heaven [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (distributed by Koch Media). In the latter film, the German director of Downfall [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bernd Eichinger
interview: Joachim Fest
interview: Oliver Hirschbiegel
film profile] looks at Northern Ireland’s violent past through a confrontation between two men.

Besides Hartmann’s film, Austrian theatres will see the release of a local title: Sebastian Brameshuber’s documentary Muezzin (distributed by Filmladen); Lucien Jean-Baptiste’s French film Meet the Elisabethz [+see also:
trailer
film profile], about a French family of Caribbean origin on a skiing holiday (distribution: Lunafilm); and the co-production Syndromes and a Century, by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who won the Cannes Palme d'Or last month.

(Translated from French)