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SUNDANCE 2016 Germany

German diversity at Sundance

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- The 33rd Sundance Film Festival will welcome an extremely diverse German cinema, with films such as Axolotl Overkill, Manifesto and co-production My Happy Family

German diversity at Sundance
Axolotl Overkill by Helene Hegemann

With a young female director from Germany, a Georgian-German directorial duo, and a film installation artist amongst its guests, amongst others (for a total of 9 German productions and co-productions), the 33rd Sundance Film Festival (19 to 29 January) is giving a platform to extremely diverse German filmmakers.

Helene Hegemann’s debut feature Axolotl Overkill [+see also:
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interview: Helene Hegemann
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(Vandertastic, Constantin Film Produktion), based on her hotly debated eponymous hit novel, was invited in the World Dramatic Competition, making the author/director/scriptwriter the second German woman director in a row (after Nicolette Krebitz with Wild [+see also:
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) to enter the main section of the prestigious event North-American event. Axolotl Overkill tells the story of Mifti (Jasna Fritzi Bauer), a 16-year-old who looks like she’s 12 but behaves as if she was in her mid-30s and has been living with her half-siblings in a Berlin flat share since her mother's death. With a father who considers terrorism as a contemporary profession and is more interested in art than people, going to school makes less sense than spending one's time between parties, drugs, affairs and kitchen table politics. Wild, sad, rational and in love, and convinced that the adults she comes across are just desperate, Mifti has to find a way to become an adult herself.

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The competition will also feature the German-Georgian-French co-production My Happy Family [+see also:
film review
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interview: Nana Ekvtimishvili, Simon G…
film profile
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(augenschein Filmproduktion), Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’third joint project after Fata morgana and In Bloom [+see also:
film review
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interview: Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simo…
film profile
]
. It centers on a teacher, Manana, who announces to a shocked and speechless family circle, on her 52nd birthday, that she needs space and will therefore move out from the three-room flat located in Tbilisi that she shares with her husband, parents, grownup children, etc. The World Dramatic Competition also includes Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton Incident [+see also:
film review
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interview: Tarik Saleh
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(SE/DE/DK, German co-producer: ostlicht filmproduktion) and John Trengove’s The Wound [+see also:
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 (ZA/DE, German co-producer: Riva Film).

Running in the World Cinema Documentary Competition are Feras Fayyad and Stehen Johannessen’s Last Men in Aleppo [+see also:
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(DK/DE, Kloos & Co. Medien) and Rahul Jain’s Machines [+see also:
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(IN/DE/FI, Pallas Film).

In the Premieres sidebar, film artist Julian Rosefeldt will be presenting Manifesto [+see also:
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(DE/AU/HK), which includes 13 films condensing numerous artistic manifestos from all fields of art into text collages and poetic monologues, delivered and performed by the Australian actress Cate Blanchett, which transforms herself into such different characters as a primary schoolteacher, a puppeteer, a broker, a funeral speechmaker and a homeless person and puts the texts into an unexpected and contemporary context.

The Spotlight sidebar will feature François Ozon’s French-German co-production Frantz [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: François Ozon
film profile
]
. Volker Schlecht and Alexander Lahl will be presenting Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck in the Animated Short Films Section.

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