Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

CULTURE

Germany holds virtual Berlinale film festival

With theatres shuttered due to the coronavirus outbreak, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year begins in Berlin on Monday.

Published: 27 February 2021 12:37 CET
Germany holds virtual Berlinale film festival
German actress Paula Beer poses with the trophy "Silver Bear for Best Actress" during the awarding ceremony of the 70th Berlinale film festival in Berlin on February 29, 2020. Photo: Tobias Schwarz / AFP

Due to the pandemic The Berlinale has been pushed back by a month, put online and divided into two parts as the movie industry struggles to find its feet. Now in its 71st year, The Berlinale will hold the competition virtually for critics, reporters and rights buyers from 1st-5th March. 

For the second stage, organisers hope to invite stars and screen the films for the general public in June, mainly at open-air cinemas. Last year’s event, one of the last before the pandemic, sold more than 330,000 tickets.

The festival has also gone “gender neutral” with its acting awards — best actress and best actor prizes are history, replaced with best lead and supporting performance.

Industry watchers say that despite severe restrictions on making and screening movies, the Berlinale has managed to pull together an exciting lineup.

“I’m pleasantly surprised that they were able to get what looks like a pretty impressive collection of solid movies together for this festival,” Scott Roxborough, European bureau chief for The Hollywood Reporter, told AFP.

The world premiere of a documentary about music legend Tina Turner and an “impressive” pack of pandemic-era movies will take the spotlight at an all-virtual Berlin film festival starting on March 1, 2021. Photo: by Lionel Bonaventure/AFP

‘Uncertain times’

One of the hottest titles is “Tina”, a star-studded HBO documentary about the queen of rock’n’roll by Oscar winners Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”) to be released on March 27.

The film features never-before-seen concert footage, interviews with the 81-year-old superstar and recollections from the likes of Angela Bassett and Oprah Winfrey.

Directors including Emmy winner Maria Schrader (“Unorthodox”), German-Spanish actor Daniel Bruehl (“Rush”) and France’s Celine Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) will be premiering new work in competition.

All 15 contenders for the top prizes to be awarded on Friday are films that were made or in post-production during the pandemic.

Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian said the selection captures “the uncertain times we are experiencing”.

Bruehl, who starred in the bittersweet German comedy “Good Bye, Lenin” and is now part of the Captain America franchise, will make his directorial debut with “Next Door”, a black comedy about gentrification.

Schrader will unveil “I’m Your Man”, a sci-fi comedy about a woman falling for a custom-made Mr Right, played by British actor Dan Stevens (“Beauty and the Beast”) while Sciamma offers up “Petite Maman”, a magical realist look at girlhood.

One of Romania’s top filmmakers, Radu Jude, is back with the intriguingly titled “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” about a teacher whose sex tape winds up on the internet.

Hong Sang-soo of South Korea, who won best director in Berlin last year for “The Woman Who Ran”, will show “Introduction”, vying against titles from Japan, Mexico and Lebanon.

 
Bear trophies for the upcoming 71st Berlinale film festival are displayed during a media tour at the Noack foundry in Berlin. Photo: Hannibal Hanschke/AFP)

Watching under house arrest

The Berlinale comes at a complicated time for the industry.

With the glamour of the red carpet and the magic of the big-screen experience sorely lacking, Roxborough said festivals were still “experimenting” with formats as the pandemic drags on.

“A danger of these virtual festivals is that even critics can’t get super excited about watching films at home,” he said.

“They have to have some kind of communal experience to go crazy for the movie that nobody’s heard about but that now everybody just has to see.”

Cannes hopes to hold its festival in July after being cancelled last year.

Venice managed to benefit from a break in high infection levels to take place last September with a range of special precautions.

But this winter, with the second wave raging, Sundance was held online.

The Berlinale jury will be made up of six previous Golden Bear winners including last year’s laureate, dissident Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, who claimed the prize for “There Is No Evil” about capital punishment.

Five of the members will all stay at the same hotel and sit, physically distanced, in a Berlin cinema made specially available under lockdown, while Rasoulof will watch from Tehran under house arrest.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

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!

SHOW COMMENTS