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FILM

Berlinale honours jailed Iranian director

The Berlin film festival will honour dissident Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to prison in December, on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution Friday.

Published: 11 February 2011 08:01 CET
Berlinale honours jailed Iranian director
Photo: DPA

Following tributes in Cannes and Venice, Berlin invited Panahi to serve on its jury. But though he is free on bail after receiving a six-year jail sentence and a 20-year film-making ban, he is barred from travelling abroad.

The 61st Berlinale, as the event in known, has held a place open on the jury, chaired by Italian-American actress Isabella Rossellini, for Panahi “to show its support for his struggle for freedom”.

“We are still hoping that he will be able to come. We haven’t given up,” the Italian-American actress told reporters at the festival’s opening news conference Thursday, as she sat next to his vacant chair.

“He is a very big presence even though he is not here,” she added, stressing that the decision to include him on the panel in absentia was a reminder that “freedom of speech is at the base of freedom of art and film-making.”

Panahi was convicted of illicit propaganda for working on a film about unrest after the disputed re election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009.

Film-makers, writers and artists have complained of increased censorship under Ahmadinejad’s presidency.

Festival director Dieter Kosslick has repeatedly appealed to Iranian authorities to allow Panahi, whose cause has also attracted the support of Hollywood giants Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, to attend the event.

“Offside”, Panahi’s comedy about girls who dress up as boys so they can sneak into a football match, will screen Friday in the festival’s main showcase in place of a competition film.

Panahi, a 50-year-old veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who tackles taboo issues such as prostitution and the oppression of women in his work, won a Silver Bear prize for “Offside” at the Berlinale in 2006.

The 10-day event will showcase another four of Panahi’s award-winning pictures such as “The Circle” and “Crimson Gold”, introduced by Iranian directors and actors.

This year’s competition among 16 international contenders will feature compatriot Asghar Farhadi, who won a best director prize for his haunting drama “About Elly” at the 2009 festival.

His latest picture, “Nader and Simin, A Separation” about an estranged couple reunited by a surprise event, will premiere Tuesday.

Farhadi faced a production ban by Iranian authorities while making the film for comments in support of Panahi. The ban was later lifted.

Next Thursday, the festival will hold a panel discussion entitled “Censored Cinema” with Iranian film-makers and artists on “censorship, and the restriction of freedom of opinion and expression in Iran”.

It will feature director Rafi Pitts, whose political thriller “The Hunter” appeared in the 2010 competition, Ali Samadi Ahadi, who made searing documentary “The Green Wave” about the 2009 opposition protests, as well as author-activist Mehrangiz Kar.

Samadi Ahadi, who lives in Germany, said that negotiations between the West and Iran on Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme, for example, were intertwined with the human rights issue.

“Iranian cinema is in a kind of state of emergency right now because the government has not really let people work in Iran since 2009,” he told Berlin magazine Tip.

“The fact that festivals like the Berlinale declare their solidarity and leave a place for Panahi on their jury is more than just a gesture. Because if the Iranian government tramples on the rights of its own people, why should it not do the same with the international community?”

AFP/ka

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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