05/04/2005

The 4th German Film Festival in Australia, organised by German Films and the Goethe Institute has added a fourth city to its program ; besides Sydney (14th-24th April), Melbourne (15th-24th April) and Brisbane (20th-23d April), the best of recent German production will also travel to Canberra (28th April-1st May). 15 short films (amongst which Susanne Seidel’s latest work which she is bringing there in person) and 16 full-length features were selected.
Dani Levy’s Go For Zucker!-An Unorthodox Comedy will be presented by the director himself at the opening night. It is the first German-Jewish comedy since WW2. History is precisely a major theme this year, for the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. In this respect, the monumental Heimat 3 by Edgar Reitz, the screening of which will be attended by the main actor, Henry Arnold, was very legitimately included in a selection where we can also find Downfall by Oliver Hirschbiegel (who will attend this Australian premiere), the controversial film about Hitler’s last days which represented Germany at the 2005 Oscars, as well as Napola by Dennis Gansel, which shows what education was in a military school of the German Reich in 1942. The latter director and all the above-mentioned guests will participate in a series of discussions around the folowing topic : ‘Cinematic journey through the tumultuous 20th century - Remastering the German Past?’. The Other Woman by Margarethe von Trotta and the documentary I Love You All by Eyal Sivan and Audrey Maurion also fit perfectly into the programme, for they are both about former Stasi agents.
The festival also includes less historically charged movies, such as Agnes and His Brothers, a German version of American Beauty by Oskar Roehler (which won the Bavarian Film Award 2004 as Best Script and participated to many festivals such as Venice 2004, Sevilla 2004 (in competition), Rotterdam 2005, New York 2005 (New Directors/New Films), and Berlin 2005), the comedy C(r)ook by Pepe Danquart, and Musica Cubana by German Kral, which is a kind of sequel to Buena Vista Social Club by Win Wenders whose film Wings of Desire will be re-issued during the festival, after 10 years of absence on the Australian screens.
The full programme is available on the Goethe Institute website.

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(Translated from French)