Berlin, Divided Heaven: From the Ice Age to the Thaw
Touring Film Series

Berlin Today - A New Generation of German Directors

From the ruins to the Wall to the anonymity of modern housing, films have depicted the architecture and cityscape of Berlin as contested territory. What social aspirations will be given physical form? Whose experience represents the tenor of these times? Whose past suffering will be memorialized? How does the city physically resist all attempts to erase the traces of its past? Lights from Afar is but one look at "Berlin Today." This film captures in profound images the complicated relationship Berlin's residents have with their city. Other suggestions include the hip, high-paced hit, Run Lola Run, and the deeply reflective Paths Into the Night. Since unification, Berlin has tried to undergo a rigorous metamorphosis; these films reflect that and the pulse of the "new city." The connection between Berliners and their city make for vibrant, brutally honest movies, where often complicated fates are interwoven. These films share a gritty, new morality that seems characteristic of post-unification Berlin, a cinematic contrast to the cautious politics of the "Berlin Republic."

Lights from Afar (Lichter aus dem Hintergrund)

Suggested further viewing:  

Paths in the Night (Wege in die Nacht)
1999, Germany, b/w, 98 min.
Dir.:  Andreas Kleinert
Script:  Johann Bergk
Camera:  Jürgen Jürges
Editing:  Gisela Zick
Music:  Andreas Hoge, Steven Garling
Cast:  Hilmar Thate, Cornelia Schmaus, Henriette Heinze, Dirk Borchardt
Distributed in 1999 & 2000 by Basis-Film Verleih Berlin and Inter Nationes  

Andreas Kleinert was one of the last graduates of the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf” (the film academy of East Berlin) before German reunification, and has made four feature films since. Paths in the Night, the first German film chosen to open Cannes’ Directors Fortnight in its 31-year-old history, confirms Andreas Kleinert as the film-poet among an emerging generation of talented directors in Germany. In all of Kleinert’s films, his powerful metaphorical statements are conveyed by a solid ensemble casts and professional credits. In Paths in the Night, stunningly shot in black and white, Hilmar Thate plays an ex-communist in his mid-fifties who was once powerful, but is now redundant and adrift in post-unification Germany, a society that no longer has any use for him. Spurred by his belief in a better world, the unemployed Walter joins forces with two young vigilantes in a nocturnal battle for law and order in Berlin’s subways. Paths in the Night composes a powerful and poetic picture of a forlorn love and a psyche running amok.

Hilmar Thate won best actor at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival 1999; Wege in die Nacht won best feature film at Potsdam Film Festival 1999.

Run Lola Run (Lola rennt)
1999, Germany, color, 80 min.
Dir. & Script:  Tom Tykwer
Camera:  Frank Griebe
Editing:  Mathilde Bonnefoy
Music:  Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Franka Potente, Tom Tykwer
Cast:  Franke Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup
Distributed in 1999 & 2000
16mm, 35mm, New Yorker Films
VHS, DVD Sony Pictures Classics  

The possibilities are endless, but which is the right one? A masterfully woven narrative of time and chance: It is 11:40 am and Manni, a petty smuggler who has to deliver the fruits of his labor to his ruthless mob-boss, left his loot - 100,000 Marks to be precise - on the train. Desperate, he calls the only person he can trust - the love of his life, Lola. He tells her, if she cannot come up with that sum of money by 12 noon sharp, the time he is to hand the money over to Ronni the boss, he plans to commit a robbery. Sure that either a hold-up or not paying Ronni off will be Manni’s end, Lola promises to bring him the entire amount in 20 minutes. In a montage of animation and live-action running through the streets of central Berlin, Lola tests fate, luck and the meaning of love, which unravels into three different narratives. The hip music is addictive and the kind to which no one can sit still. Many agree this is the best thing to come out of German filmmaking since New German Cinema - and this is more fun.

Night Shapes (Nachtgestalten)
1999, Germany, color, 104 min.
Dir. & Script:  Andreas Dresen
Camera:  Andreas Höfer
Editing:  Monika Schindler.
Music:  Cathrin Pfeifer, Rainer Rohloff
Cast:  Meriam Abbas, Dominique Horwitz, Oliver Bäßler, Susanne Bormann, Michael Gwisdek, Ricardo Valentim
Distributed in 1999 & 2000
35mm, Inter Nationes

Night Shapes - a cluster of stories, influenced by Robert Altman’s Shortcuts, about a single night in Berlin and the search for happiness. Stories that interweave and overlap like the network of pipes and cables beneath Berlin’s streets. Narrated in brief sequences and fragments, Night Shapes weaves together to form three journeys - and several smaller ones too - through the night when the Pope came to Berlin. A slice of believable nightlife featuring “real, everyday people” - some homeless, a hooker, a farmer, punks, an immigrant boy, a businessman and a taxi driver - and what they all have in common.

Nominated for best feature, Berlinale 1999. Michael Gwisdek awarded best actor, Berlinale 1999.  

killer.berlin.doc
1999, Germany, color, 74 min.
Dir., Script, Camera & Editing:  Tina Ellerkamp, Jörg Heitmann
Music:  Jim Lusted
Cast:  Max Andersson, Dagie Brundert, Alexander Felicella, Akiko Lusted, Barbara Philipp, Klaus Weber
Distributed in 1999 & 2000 by dogfilm (Berlin)  

Part of a new tradition in contemporary filmmaking exemplified by The Blair Witch Project, the film killer.berlin.doc is a neat fiction parading as a documentary. Filmmakers Ellerkamp and Heitmann use video art, authentic footage and dramatized events to build a narrative drawing the viewer into a voyeuristic desire to discover what it is like to kill or be killed.  At the same time, the depiction of Berlin’s diverse architectural styles and bizarre murder tools (such as plastic poisonous spiders) reinforce the traditional thriller genre. In May 1998, ten people (such as video artist Akiko Hada, cartoonist Max Andersson and super-8 filmmaker Dagie Brunert) decide to turn their lives in Berlin into fiction. They play “killer”: a game in which no one knows the others, and each person is perpetrator as well as victim. The assignment is to murder - perfectly. But while the murderer plans, he or she is also being tracked. “The players cast a net across Berlin, and in the places visited and assassinations committed, a curious sketch of the city emerges.” (Lawrence Kardish, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City)

Break Even (plus-minus-null)
1998, Germany, color, 80 min
Dir. & Script:  Eoin Moore
Camera:  Bernd Löhr, Eoin Moore
Editing:  Dirk Grau, Eoin Moore
Cast:  Andreas Schmidt, Tamara Simunovic, Kathleen Gallego Zapata
Distributed in 1999 & 2000 by Inter Nationes

Alex (Andreas Schmidt) is a construction worker on the massive Potsdamer Platz site, and lives in an aluminum box. He gets to know two young prostitutes, Svetlana (Tamara Simunovic), a Yugoslavian woman who is desperately trying to earn enough money to open a beauty salon upon her imminent and unwanted return to her homeland, and Ruth (Kathleen Gallego Zapata), a former kindergarten teacher, who enjoys the freedom her job allows. Alex is fond of both women, but remains distant from Svetlana when she voices her desire to marry him so she can stay in the country. He tries to convince Ruth to change her profession, which leads to her rejecting him. His friendships with both women dissolve, each moving away from him into her “chosen destiny.” After losing his job on the site, he finds another and begins again, seemingly with the same attitude as before. This film captures the reality of contemporary Berlin - a brutally uncertain future wedged between honesty and resignation.

Related reading:

Doud, David Tieman. Berlin 2000. The Center of Europe. Lanham, Maryland and London: University Press of America, 1995.

Howard, Marc. “An East German Ethnicity? Understanding the New Division of Unified Germany.” German Politics and Society 13.4 (Winter 1995): 49-70.

Jarausch, Konrad H., ed. After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997.

Silberman, Marc. "Post-Wall Documentaries: New Images from a New Germany?" Cinema Journal 33.2 (Winter 1994): 22-41.

Simpson, Patricia A, guest ed. Gegenwartsbewältigung: The GDR After the Wende. Special Issue of Michigan Germanic Studies 21.1/2 (Spring/Fall, 1995).

Stern, Susan, ed. Meet United Germany: Handbook 1992/93. Frankfurt: Atlantik-Brücke, 1992.

Strom, Elizabeth and Margit Meyer. “The New Berlin.” German Politics and Society 16.4 (Winter 1998): 122-139.

Watson, Alan. The Germans: Who Are They Now? 2nd ed. London: Mandarin, 1995.  

Return to Film Tour Contents