According to the Oxford English Dictionary the verb “to lament” is described as “to feel or express great sadness or disappointment about somebody/something”. The word is also regarded as a synonym for “to wail” or “to complain”, giving it a vague negative connotation, for “to lament about a condition” is just complaining about something in words, rather than through actions. Considering this definition, you could say that “Happy Lamento”, a collaboration between German director Alexander Kluge and Filipino director Khavn de la Cruz poses an interesting contradiction, since it is about the happiness or joy of complaining about a condition, as the title suggests.
In general, “Happy Lamento” does not follow a narrative of any kind, and should rather be considered a cinematic collage. Sorted through various chapters with titles like “Moon” or “Circus”, Alexander Kluge interviews friends and colleagues of his, among them writer and dramatist Heiner Müller...
In general, “Happy Lamento” does not follow a narrative of any kind, and should rather be considered a cinematic collage. Sorted through various chapters with titles like “Moon” or “Circus”, Alexander Kluge interviews friends and colleagues of his, among them writer and dramatist Heiner Müller...
- 12/24/2019
- by Rouven Linnarz
- AsianMoviePulse
Exclusive: Interview with Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick.
The Berlinale’s greater emphasis on television this year should not be interpreted as the first step towards a German Mip, according to festival director Dieter Kosslick.
In an exclusive interview with ScreenDaily, Kosslick said: ¨We don’t want to make a Mip TV or Mipcom, that’s as sure as day follows night and anything more would overstretch us.¨
He pointed out that that the Berlinale had had successful screenings of quality TV in the past with such productions as Dominik Graf’s Im Namen des Verbrechens, Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
“We have now been working for the past two years on this programme which is composed of two parts: a series of discussions on new trends at the Efm and two days of drama series integrated into the festival programme and shown at Haus der Berliner [link=tt...
The Berlinale’s greater emphasis on television this year should not be interpreted as the first step towards a German Mip, according to festival director Dieter Kosslick.
In an exclusive interview with ScreenDaily, Kosslick said: ¨We don’t want to make a Mip TV or Mipcom, that’s as sure as day follows night and anything more would overstretch us.¨
He pointed out that that the Berlinale had had successful screenings of quality TV in the past with such productions as Dominik Graf’s Im Namen des Verbrechens, Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
“We have now been working for the past two years on this programme which is composed of two parts: a series of discussions on new trends at the Efm and two days of drama series integrated into the festival programme and shown at Haus der Berliner [link=tt...
- 1/27/2015
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Oscar-nominated UK director Tanel Toom and Estonian documentary maker Jaak Kilmi are among 22 film-makers with film projects in the fifth edition of the When East Meets West (Wemw) co-production forum (Jan 18-20).
Estonian-born Toom, who was nominated for The Confession (his graduation film from the UK’s Nfts), will be in Trieste with his fiction feature debut, the sci-fi thriller Gateway 6, to be produced by Matt Wilkinson and Ben Pullen’s Stigma Films, while Latvian producer Antra Gaile of Mistrus Media will be pitching Kilmi’s People From Nowhere.
A total of 10 documentaries and 12 fiction feature projects from 13 countries were selected from a record 285 submissions, including 57 from Italy, 38 from the UK, 19 from Canada, 15 from Ireland, 13 from the Us, and 143 from Eastern Europe.
Since Wemw’s 2015 edition has a focus on English-speaking countries, the line-up includes:
veteran Canadian film-maker Anne Henderson’s documentary project Missing Persona;
the Us-Italian co-production The Oldest Man Alive by Antonio Tibaldi, to be produced...
Estonian-born Toom, who was nominated for The Confession (his graduation film from the UK’s Nfts), will be in Trieste with his fiction feature debut, the sci-fi thriller Gateway 6, to be produced by Matt Wilkinson and Ben Pullen’s Stigma Films, while Latvian producer Antra Gaile of Mistrus Media will be pitching Kilmi’s People From Nowhere.
A total of 10 documentaries and 12 fiction feature projects from 13 countries were selected from a record 285 submissions, including 57 from Italy, 38 from the UK, 19 from Canada, 15 from Ireland, 13 from the Us, and 143 from Eastern Europe.
Since Wemw’s 2015 edition has a focus on English-speaking countries, the line-up includes:
veteran Canadian film-maker Anne Henderson’s documentary project Missing Persona;
the Us-Italian co-production The Oldest Man Alive by Antonio Tibaldi, to be produced...
- 1/5/2015
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Turkish director Erdem Tepegöz’s social drama The Particle (Zerre) has won the Golden George for Best Film at the 35th Moscow International Film Festival (Miff).
The film’s lead actress, Jale Arikan, also picked up the Best Actress Silver George for her performance as Zeynep, trying to make ends meet in the dusty and dim atmosphere of abandoned apartments evacuated for clearance.
The International Jury under the presidency of Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf awarded the Silver George for Best Director to South Korea’s Jung Young-Heon for Lebanon Emotion (Le-Ba-Non Kam-Jeong).
The Best Actor prize went to Russia’s Alexey Shevchenkov for his title role as Judas in Andrey Bogatyryov’s Judas (Iuda).
The Special Jury award went to The Ravine Of Goodbye (Sayonara Keikoku) by Japan’s Tatsushi Omori.
The Documentary Competition jury - which included Claas Danielsen, director of Dok Leipzig - gave its award to Poland’s Pawel Lozinski for Father And Son (Ojciec...
The film’s lead actress, Jale Arikan, also picked up the Best Actress Silver George for her performance as Zeynep, trying to make ends meet in the dusty and dim atmosphere of abandoned apartments evacuated for clearance.
The International Jury under the presidency of Iranian film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf awarded the Silver George for Best Director to South Korea’s Jung Young-Heon for Lebanon Emotion (Le-Ba-Non Kam-Jeong).
The Best Actor prize went to Russia’s Alexey Shevchenkov for his title role as Judas in Andrey Bogatyryov’s Judas (Iuda).
The Special Jury award went to The Ravine Of Goodbye (Sayonara Keikoku) by Japan’s Tatsushi Omori.
The Documentary Competition jury - which included Claas Danielsen, director of Dok Leipzig - gave its award to Poland’s Pawel Lozinski for Father And Son (Ojciec...
- 7/1/2013
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Many—maybe too many, looking at this bunch of bone-tired warriors of Av-virtue—were the travels the Ferroni Brigade embarked on all through 2011: oftentimes for festivals all over Europe, sometimes for visits to this archive or that as part of our programming arbeit (to be read with a Japanese drawl). During those months in the dark, we saw a lot—some of which chimed and rhymed with new works we encountered in this multiplex back home or that gallery abroad, on this collector's Steenbeck or in that producer's private projection room (they still exist).
On one of those trips, we were joined by our main Mubi-man, His Kasness a.k.a. the Kasest with whom we plunged one evening into a brainstorming on what The Festival would look and feel like (truth be told: it was more like a communal delirium—but what do you expect from folks sitting...
On one of those trips, we were joined by our main Mubi-man, His Kasness a.k.a. the Kasest with whom we plunged one evening into a brainstorming on what The Festival would look and feel like (truth be told: it was more like a communal delirium—but what do you expect from folks sitting...
- 1/5/2012
- MUBI
MUNICH -- Dani Levy's controversial comedy "My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" was Germany's top film after its release Thursday -- despite critical reviews and a public spat between writer-director Levy and the film's star, German comic Helge Schneider (HR 1/9).
With 45,000 tickets sold on opening night, "Fuehrer" easily outpaced last week's No. 1 film, the Ben Stiller comedy "Night at the Museum". Levy's last feature, "Alles auf Zucker!" (2005) sold more than a million tickets.
On Thursday evening, Levy and Schneider appeared together on one of Germany's top-rated late-night shows to bury the hatchet.
"I've said (negative things) about albums I've made," said Schneider, who also is an accomplished musician and songwriter. "For instance, I'd say that the album before last was shit," he went on. "I wouldn't say that this film is shit. I said that more could have been made out of it, and that wasn't meant as criticism."
Levy, for his part, said that he was "in love" with Schneider's acting abilities and that he had dreamed of seeing the comedian in the part from the very beginning of the project.
With 45,000 tickets sold on opening night, "Fuehrer" easily outpaced last week's No. 1 film, the Ben Stiller comedy "Night at the Museum". Levy's last feature, "Alles auf Zucker!" (2005) sold more than a million tickets.
On Thursday evening, Levy and Schneider appeared together on one of Germany's top-rated late-night shows to bury the hatchet.
"I've said (negative things) about albums I've made," said Schneider, who also is an accomplished musician and songwriter. "For instance, I'd say that the album before last was shit," he went on. "I wouldn't say that this film is shit. I said that more could have been made out of it, and that wasn't meant as criticism."
Levy, for his part, said that he was "in love" with Schneider's acting abilities and that he had dreamed of seeing the comedian in the part from the very beginning of the project.
- 1/12/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
BERLIN -- The marketing concept is a sound one: Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germans want to forget the shame and guilt of the Third Reich and be able to laugh about Hitler.
That's the zeitgeist that almost certainly will make "My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" (Mein Fuehrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit ueber Adolf Hitler) a hit in Germany, where it opens Thursday, and it also provides a slogan ("Germany's first comedy about Hitler!") that will generate respectable ticket sales in art house theaters internationally.
The only problem is that "Mein Fuehrer" is not actually funny.
The film is being marketed as a comedy and is being compared to other great Third Reich comedies, from Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful". But it is not so much a comedy as a bland, politically correct fantasy about a Jew who teaches Hitler how to be Hitler.
As played by stand-up comedian Helge Schneider, Hitler is a lovable sad sack who has lost his will to triumph in the final months of the war at a time when the German people need him most. Goebbels has a great idea: We'll take a Jewish actor named Adolf Gruenbaum out of a concentration camp and get him to coach Hitler to make a single last-ditch effort inspire the Germans to support the war at an upcoming rally.
What follows is a chamber play between the two, in which Gruenbaum (played with quiet precision by Ulrich Muehe, fresh off his success in "The Lives of Others") devotes most of his time to therapy, getting Hitler to crawl around on hands and knees, barking, and to talk about his relationship with his father.
There are flashes of humor: Hitler in a track suit, Hitler playing with a toy battleship in a bubble bath or Hitler being humped by his dog Blondi. But director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes. There are even flashes of controversy, as when the dictator tauntingly asks Gruenbaum why the Jews didn't fight back. (This question is mirrored in Gruenbaum's situation: Although the opportunity is repeatedly handed to him on a silver platter, Gruenbaum never has the nerve to kill Hitler.) But the theme is neither developed enough to inspire controversy nor funny enough to entertain.
Levy, a Swiss-born Jewish auteur who tackled German-Jewish issues in his recent hit "Go for Zucker!" seems less interested in comedy than he is in getting across a moral: We learn that Hitler had a small penis and was compensating for an unhappy childhood. That might be true, but we've heard it before, and from real historians. In the meantime, it has lost its allure as history or as potential for humor.
The final joke in the movie is a pun: When Hitler loses his voice, Gruenbaum has to bark the speech into a microphone while the Fuehrer lip-syncs it. Gruenbaum takes the opportunity to instruct the German nation to "Heal yourselves" (instead of "Heil Hitler", since heil also means "heal" in German). It's an important message but a weak pun.
The mood is light throughout, production values are excellent, and the film works as entertainment directed at an older set of viewers who are opposed to excitable fare. (Three state-funded public broadcasters, whose core audiences are largely older than 50, were involved in the production.) But to duplicate the success of "Life Is Beautiful", Levy would have done better to concentrate on the characters and comedy and leave the preaching to others.
MY FUEHRER -- THE REALLY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER
X Filme Creative Pool/Y Filme Directors Pool
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Dani Levy
Producer: Marcos Kantis
Executive producers: Stefan Arndt, Barbara Buhl, Andreas Schreitmueller, Bettina Reitz
Director of photography: Carl-F Koschnick
Art director: Christian Eisele
Music: Niki Reiser
Costume designer: Nicole Fischnaller
Editor: Peter R. Adam
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Helge Schneider
Prof. Adolf Gruenbaum: Ulrich Muehe
Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth
Elsa Gruenbaum: Adriana Altaras
Albert Speer: Stefan Kurt
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen
Rattenhuber: Lambert Hamel
Martin Bormann: Udo Kroschwald
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
That's the zeitgeist that almost certainly will make "My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" (Mein Fuehrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit ueber Adolf Hitler) a hit in Germany, where it opens Thursday, and it also provides a slogan ("Germany's first comedy about Hitler!") that will generate respectable ticket sales in art house theaters internationally.
The only problem is that "Mein Fuehrer" is not actually funny.
The film is being marketed as a comedy and is being compared to other great Third Reich comedies, from Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful". But it is not so much a comedy as a bland, politically correct fantasy about a Jew who teaches Hitler how to be Hitler.
As played by stand-up comedian Helge Schneider, Hitler is a lovable sad sack who has lost his will to triumph in the final months of the war at a time when the German people need him most. Goebbels has a great idea: We'll take a Jewish actor named Adolf Gruenbaum out of a concentration camp and get him to coach Hitler to make a single last-ditch effort inspire the Germans to support the war at an upcoming rally.
What follows is a chamber play between the two, in which Gruenbaum (played with quiet precision by Ulrich Muehe, fresh off his success in "The Lives of Others") devotes most of his time to therapy, getting Hitler to crawl around on hands and knees, barking, and to talk about his relationship with his father.
There are flashes of humor: Hitler in a track suit, Hitler playing with a toy battleship in a bubble bath or Hitler being humped by his dog Blondi. But director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes. There are even flashes of controversy, as when the dictator tauntingly asks Gruenbaum why the Jews didn't fight back. (This question is mirrored in Gruenbaum's situation: Although the opportunity is repeatedly handed to him on a silver platter, Gruenbaum never has the nerve to kill Hitler.) But the theme is neither developed enough to inspire controversy nor funny enough to entertain.
Levy, a Swiss-born Jewish auteur who tackled German-Jewish issues in his recent hit "Go for Zucker!" seems less interested in comedy than he is in getting across a moral: We learn that Hitler had a small penis and was compensating for an unhappy childhood. That might be true, but we've heard it before, and from real historians. In the meantime, it has lost its allure as history or as potential for humor.
The final joke in the movie is a pun: When Hitler loses his voice, Gruenbaum has to bark the speech into a microphone while the Fuehrer lip-syncs it. Gruenbaum takes the opportunity to instruct the German nation to "Heal yourselves" (instead of "Heil Hitler", since heil also means "heal" in German). It's an important message but a weak pun.
The mood is light throughout, production values are excellent, and the film works as entertainment directed at an older set of viewers who are opposed to excitable fare. (Three state-funded public broadcasters, whose core audiences are largely older than 50, were involved in the production.) But to duplicate the success of "Life Is Beautiful", Levy would have done better to concentrate on the characters and comedy and leave the preaching to others.
MY FUEHRER -- THE REALLY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER
X Filme Creative Pool/Y Filme Directors Pool
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Dani Levy
Producer: Marcos Kantis
Executive producers: Stefan Arndt, Barbara Buhl, Andreas Schreitmueller, Bettina Reitz
Director of photography: Carl-F Koschnick
Art director: Christian Eisele
Music: Niki Reiser
Costume designer: Nicole Fischnaller
Editor: Peter R. Adam
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Helge Schneider
Prof. Adolf Gruenbaum: Ulrich Muehe
Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth
Elsa Gruenbaum: Adriana Altaras
Albert Speer: Stefan Kurt
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen
Rattenhuber: Lambert Hamel
Martin Bormann: Udo Kroschwald
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
COLOGNE, Germany -- Dani Levy's comedy "Mein Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" is stirring up controversy in Germany ahead of its Thursday release, but not in the way the director or observers expected.
Instead of sparking outrage and uproar, most critics have greeted the "first German comedy about Hitler" with a yawn and a shrug.
"What you can reproach Levy for is not for making a comedy about Hitler," Peter Zander wrote in national daily Die Welt, "but for making such a half-hearted one. ... 'Mein Fuehrer' is -- maybe the worst thing one can say about a comedy -- too harmless."
Christoph Petersen, in his review posted at filmstarts.de, said: "Every single Hitler gag is proudly cemented in intellect, every satirical charge against the Third Reich secured with several safety nets. In the end, cowardice is victorious, and there's a good chance that the majority of the audience will have dozed off in boredom before the final speech."
Oddly, the film's harshest critic is its star, German comic Helge Schneider, who plays Hitler.
Instead of sparking outrage and uproar, most critics have greeted the "first German comedy about Hitler" with a yawn and a shrug.
"What you can reproach Levy for is not for making a comedy about Hitler," Peter Zander wrote in national daily Die Welt, "but for making such a half-hearted one. ... 'Mein Fuehrer' is -- maybe the worst thing one can say about a comedy -- too harmless."
Christoph Petersen, in his review posted at filmstarts.de, said: "Every single Hitler gag is proudly cemented in intellect, every satirical charge against the Third Reich secured with several safety nets. In the end, cowardice is victorious, and there's a good chance that the majority of the audience will have dozed off in boredom before the final speech."
Oddly, the film's harshest critic is its star, German comic Helge Schneider, who plays Hitler.
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