13/02/2003 - A satire about died-in-the-wool leftwing activists, a comedy about love and football in the former DDR, and Science Fiction in the section for new national film talents

Read the Special Berlinale 2003

Unlike last year’s edition which focused on sombre subjects like AIDS and HIV and the death of premature babies, this year’s Perspektive Deutsches Kino at the Berlinale looks at the lighter side of new German cinema: comedy.

Sie Haben Knut (Knut’s Been Arrested) by Stefan Krohmer, 34, and produced by Home Run Pictures GmBH of Stuttgart, is a satire about a winter break taken by a group of left-wing activists who do not distinguish the personal from the political. Krohmer is best known for his short films and a number of TV productions.

“I got the idea for this film from personal experience. I grew up in a politically committed environment. 1982 –1983 seemed the ideal setting for this film because that was when major changes in the government took place and when the pacifist movement was in its death throes. It also allows for the passage of time. The backdrop for the film is a mountain chalet, an isolated place where the protagonist finds himself living with one group of people whose political convictions are still firmly rooted in the 1970s, and another who could not care less about anything.”

Befreite Zone (Liberated Zone) is the feature film that Norbert Baumgarten made for his graduation from the Konrad Wolf School of Cinema and Television, who also produced the film in partnership with Ö Film, Junifilm, ORB and ZDF. Befreite Zone is an hilarious comedy about East Germany and the immense love of its citizens for soccer. The director called the film “a love story about soccer with a happy end. The protagonists’ hopes for the future do not all come true but, as you know, harmony does not come cheap.”

Science Fiction is more of a surreal proposition. Directed by Franz Müller and produced by the Academy of Visual Arts of Cologne, this film develops the theory of the existence of a parallel universe to Earth and the consequences of that on time and space. “I did not want to give Science Fiction a metaphorical value because it portrays normal everyday situations with the actors behaving quite normally in a crazy storyline. That is why the film was shot in a precise chronological order.”