14/02/2006

With five features films selected at the Berlinale, including three in official competition, Thorsten Ritter from Bavaria Film International (BFI) has hardly a second to enjoy a cup of coffee at the bar just one minute away from his stand at the European Film Market.

Business was meant to be good right from the start for BFI as Jury President Charlotte Rampling inadvertently told a German radio station that she had enjoyed Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hans-Christian Schmid
interview: Hans-Christian Schmid
interview: Sandra Hueller
film profile], a BFI film screening officially at the end of the festival but that the jury watched early on in a private screening. "Requiem is already a hit for us, even though we’ve had only one buyers-only screening so far. Plus, the subject matter of exorcism is very attractive to buyers", commented Ritter.

The fourth feature film by Christian Schmid was inspired by a true story that took place in Germany in the 1970s, when a young woman left her strict Catholic home to go to university and began hearing voices. She asked a priest to help her when she started believing she was possessed by the devil, and was subjected to a series of violent exorcisms as her family and the priest refused to recognise her psychological illness. The film was produced by 23/5 Filmproduktion

Slumming [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the feature debut by Austrian documentary filmmaker Michael Glawogger was the first BFI film to screen in official competition. Generally well received by the press, sales on the black comedy about a cruel joke on a drunken poet that unexpectedly turns everybody´s lives around should be clinched very soon for Benelux, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Matthias Glasner's The Free Will, also shown in competition, is the story of a rapist who tries to find true love once released from prison, a tough subject matter that most buyers will be cautious about, says Ritter. The Panorama entry The Red Cockatoo by Dominik Graff, "one of the most influential German directors these days", is also attracting a lot of interest. The dramatic love story set in the spring of 1961, a few months before the Berlin wall went up, was produced by X Filme Creative Pool and will be released in Germany by X Verleih.