17/04/2008

Peter Lilienthal opened the second day of EuropaCinema with his rare film The Autograph (1984). Born in 1929, he is without a doubt one of the most important filmmakers of New German Cinema. In a masterclass he held he explained that the reason many of his films (including The Autograph) are set in South America is because when he was nine, due to his Jewish extraction, his family moved to Uruguay.

“I found solidarity and support among the people,” said the director. “I had the chance to breathe the freedom of Uruguay. Then, suddenly, the country was hurtled into darkness. But I was left with feelings of gratitude, friendship and loyalty towards a land that gave me so very much. The same feelings that connect the main characters of The Autograph”.

Michael Althen and Hans Helmut Prinzler in their Eye to Eye: All About German Film offered 100 years of their country’s film history. In the documentary, whose many fortes include excellent editing, filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Doris Dorrie and Dominik Graf comment on clips from films they have loved the most.

“Today, German cinema is successful and thriving with respect to the past,” stressed the directors. “We can only hope that it achieves the success of the 1970s”.

Two feature debuts were presented in competition today: Florian Mischa Böder’s Nichts geht mehr (Blocked Out) and Nacht vor augen (Night Before Eyes) by Brigitte Bertele. The former, which will be released in Germany in May, is the story of two brothers who do not want to grow up and who in rebelling against an opulent society decide to carry out demonstrative actions for which, however, they themselves can find no sense.

Night Before Eyes takes a European stance on the difficult homecoming from Afghanistan of a German soldier plagued with regret and nightmares. The film, which screened at the Berlinale and Prague, is still looking for a distributor.

(Translated from Italian)