The Spring 2008 German Film Series �|

Rebellious Women on the Screen:

Location: B-4 Dwinelle Hall (basement level) at 6:00pm

All films are in German with English subtitles

February 7th:  Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Marc Rothemund, 2005, 117 min)                                      

In Sophie Scholl:  Die letzten Tage, the true story of Germany�fs most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to life in a multi-award winning drama. In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students form an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.

February 21st:  The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

(Volker Schlo�Nndorff & Margarethe von Trotta, 1975, 106 min)                                     

When Katharina Blum spends the night with an alleged terrorist, her quiet, ordered life falls into ruins. Suddenly a suspect, Katharina is subject to a vicious smear campaign by the police and a ruthless tabloid journalist, testing the limits of her dignity and her sanity. This powerful adaptation of Heinrich Bo�Nll�fs novel is a stinging commentary on state power, individual freedom, and media manipulation.  In interviews for the 2003 Criterion Collection DVD release of Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie fu�Nhren kann, Schlo�Nndorff and other crew members argue for the film's continued relevance today, drawing an analogy between the political climate of panic over terrorism in 1970s West Germany and the post-September 11, 2001 situation in the U.S.

March 7-9 �gRebellion and Revolution:  Defiance in German Language, History and Art�h at the 16th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference at UC Berkeley, 370 Dwinelle Hall

March 13th:  The Legend of Paul and Paula (Heiner Carow, 1972, 105min)  

Still the most popular DEFA (East German) film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula is a moving and realistic portrait of a couple's struggle to find satisfaction and love in their everyday lives. Paula, a single mother, works long hours at a supermarket and is generally dissatisfied with her life. Approached by an older tire salesman, Herr Saft, she gravitates toward him but their relationship lacks the overriding passion she desires. Paula drifts into a bar one night and meets a most unlikely match, Paul, a respectable but slightly dull, married man. After they fall in love to a wonderful soundtrack of '70s German pop music, Paul must choose between his wife and Paula. Unable to break with his past, Paul wavers and Paula withdraws, seriously hurt. The ending is a classic example of "You don't know what you have until it's gone."

April 3rd: The Legend of Rita (Volker Schlo�Nndorff, 2000, 103 min)

Die Stille nach dem Schuss is a striking political thriller set in the later years of the Cold War.  The film recounts the struggles of a young West German woman, Rita (Bibiana Beglau), as she flees from the consequences of her radical past. Rita is initially a member of a bank-robbing, terrorist group loosely based on the real Baader-Meinhof gang, who sparred with the West German police throughout the seventies. After a series of complications, these anti-capitalist revolutionaries are forced to disband, but Rita decides to take refuge in East Germany under a false identity. As "Susanne Schmidt," a worker at a fabric dyeing plant, this former socialist activist begins to encounter some of the drab and discontented reality of a Communist state. With remarkable dexterity, the film deftly captures the conflicts at the heart of a socialist system. As the years pass and Rita is forced into other identities, the film becomes a vivid portrait of her growing sense of alienation, although her devotion to the distant ideal of socialism never changes.

April 11th: Ricordare Anna - Remember AnnaLocation:  102 Moffitt @ 6pm

(Walo Deuber, 2005, Switzerland, 96 min.)

Special Film Screening followed by a Q&A session with the director!!!!

A love tragedy. A father in search of forgiveness revisits places, emotions and mistakes from the past and in the process finds meaning and deliverance from paralyzing rigidity. Instead of constantly focusing on his daughter's death, he finally gets in touch with her life.

Viktor Looser has been living in the past for a decade. He cannot get over the death of his daughter Anna (Bibiana Beglau of The Legend of Rita) and her two children. When the past confronts him in the present, the years of bitterness suddenly appear in a different light. In severely deteriorated health, Viktor Looser decides to take a very different look at the past.  He sets off to the place which once upon a time had so profound an effect on his daughter:  Sicily. Anna felt drawn to Sicily after completing her degree in Italian in the mid 1980s. The spirited 26-year-old student left behind her involvement in militant youth rebellions of the eighties in Zurich, and, to her father's horror, passed up the opportunity of a career at the university. The search for Anna is difficult, but in dialogues with the dead Anna, who in the course of his research magically comes closer and closer to him again, his picture of his daughter's loves and woes begins to reassemble.

April 24th:  Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970, 96min)

As Herzog's second feature film, Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, is a triumph of cinematic irreverence and uncompromising creativity. A cast that's comprised entirely of dwarfs stages an uproarious and chaotic rebellion in a remote and picturesque mountain asylum of undetermined purpose. Shot in harsh yet sumptuous black and white, the film features the upturned idyll of the sanitarium playing host to the erotically obsessed and absurdly acting dwarfs as they create a microcosm of the real world's ridicules. Unforgettable images, such as a group of blind dwarfs wearing oversize darkened goggles while hobbling along a mountain path and a dwarf couple attempting to consummate their relationship by leaping from a stack of magazines onto the conjugal bed, make this film a thoroughly challenging visual experience as well as a compelling allegory for society and its outcasts. As the visual absurdity of the film reaches a sort of slow-motion fever pitch, Herzog's innate humanism injects the seemingly inhuman scenario with a deep pathos that captures viewers' attention as well as sympathy.

May 1:  The Edge of Heaven (Fatih Akin, 2007, 122min)

Auf der anderen Seite is a story of two mothers and their daughters, and, one father and his son. The lives of these six persons interweave in Germany and in Turkey; they are drifted, most unexpectedly, between these two countries. Like Fatih Akin's other remarkable feature film, Head On, this story is also about love, family, exile, and fate. The leading characters are constantly in search of a connection; they yearn for the missing members of their families.