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| Lara by Jan Ole Gerster |
Bruno Ricardo interview KINO – German Language Film Festival’s curators Corinna Lawrenz (CL) and Carlos Nogueira (CN) about the festival, German Cinema and more. KINO runs from 29
January to 5 February at Cinema
São Jorge and Goethe Institute in Lisboa and opens with Lara, a film by Jan Ole
Gerster. Foco section will be centered on German director Ulrich Köhler.
2020's
KINO seems to follow some themes: the focus on children's problems; family
struggle; the unfulfilled dreams of women. Why does the festival these are the
subjects to explore in this year's edition?
CN:
When we are looking for films, we don’t have a particular theme in mind. We
simply want to pick the films we consider the best available in a specific
year. It is only after the selection is made that some undercurrent features
become apparent. And you are right, a number of films this year focus on
children and youth mal de vivre, as well as on family problems; we could
add a couple of other themes such as the integration of migrants or coping with
mental illness.
CL: These themes of course also are not only the result
of our choice of films, but also represent a strong preoccupation of filmmakers
with certain topics or questions. Thus, they tend to be a reflection of social
issues in those countries but also on a more general level.
Ulrich Köhler is a respected name in German Cinema, but a virtually unknown to the
portuguese audience. What can they expect from his movies?
CL: Ulrich Köhler is in fact one of these cases of
filmmakers who only once had a film in commercial distribution in Portugal (In
my room) although his oeuvre of five films has received a lot of acclaim in
festivals around the world and has all the potential to reach a wider audience.
His cinematography is quite minimalistic and very coherent (he has worked with
the same director of photography throughout his career) and tackles questions
that are on the one hand a result of his very personal biography but that are
at the same time extremely universal. His films centre around characters that
live a quite comfortable life, feeling nevertheless unhappy with their accommodated existence in a capitalist society half a decade after the Second World
War, searching for a different way of being in the world.
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| Das freiwillige Jahr by Ulrich Köhler |
Do
you feel German Cinema became more established in Portugal after 17 years of
the KINO Festival?
CL: It became surely more established in the way the
festival itself became more established as a platform for seeing German
Language cinema, but of course we owe that entirely to a number of great films
and filmmakers that came up during the last years.
CN:
We would like to think that KINO played a role in promoting German-speaking
films in Portugal, but I am afraid it is more accurate consider that there are
a few names that started making films over the last 15 or so years, like
Christian Petzold in Germany or Ulrich Seidl in Austria, and whose films showed
the public that there were interesting things going on in that part of
Europe.
KINO
always seems to shed a light on younger and rising filmmakers. Is that
purposeful and intentional?
CL: Yes, we see it as one of our most important aims to
promote young cinema of the German speaking countries that would not have a big
platform otherwise. That‘s why, since last year, we also attribute an audience
award to one of the young filmmakers at KINO.
What
is the support you feel the embassies that collaborate with KINO have offered
you throughout the years?
CL: I wouldn‘t talk of support only, but of a strong
cooperation. In fact, the embassies are part of the selection process and
depending on each year‘s program they invite filmmakers and organize debates,
etc. This mode of coproduction is truly important for KINO as the cinema we present is itself extremely interlinked which becomes obvious if you look for example at the number of
coproductions we show each year.
Can
you explain the process of selecting the movies you highlight in KINO every
year?
CN:
Right after each edition, we start preparing the next one. The Berlin Film
Festival, that usually pays a particular attention to German and German-speaking
films, and that immediately follows the KINO in terms of calendar (this year,
Berlinale takes place between 20/02 and 01/03), is our starting point. Either
attending festivals or through online platforms, we try to watch as many films
as possible. Some distributors send us suggestions and sometimes we directly
contact them to ask for screening links. We meet each other regularly and we
discuss, sometimes very lively, our choices… Regarding the non-German films, we
also have to take into account the respective embassies point of view. In the
end we always come to a consensus.
Carlos Nogueira become a Kino co-curator in 2019. What
changes has that brought to the selection process?
CN:
I don’t think that I changed a lot in terms of the functioning of the festival:
KINO was a well-oiled machine with more than a decade long existence when I
started co-curating its programme last year. I may have brought a non-German
point of view to the selection, which I believe was desired by the Goethe
Institut, that may have sensed that the Portuguese audience was not being
rightly targeted.
CL: In fact what Carlos mentioned was one of the main
ideas: to turn the festival more intercultural, to have two different points of
view on the films. And of course the selection process Carlos described is way
more interesting in a team. On the other hand we also restructured the
festival‘s sections and introduced Visões, Perspetivas and Foco as the new
structure of the festival.
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| Oray by Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay |
The Goethe Institute regularly shows German movies to the audiences. How different do you feel KINO's programming is from the regular one the Institute does?
CL: Our programming throughout the year is usually more
topic-focused, whereas KINO is extremely open and only has the sole condition of presenting recent cinema. That
gives us a different kind of freedom in programming.
In
the last few years, filmes like Toni Erdmann and Never let me go were
spotlighted in several movie festivals and events, such as the Oscars. Do you
believe this success reflects the nowadays dynamics of German Cinema?
CL: I don‘t agree very much with the idea that the
dynamics of German
Cinema is reflected in single cases of success of films like Toni Erdmann or
Werk ohne Autor, if that’s the film you mentioned. In the first place, because
we’re not talking about a homogeneous corpus of cinema, your examples show that
quite well. And secondly, the dynamics lie much more in the whole development
of a filmmaker like Maren Ade and not only in one big success like her Toni
Erdmann.
Can
each of you tell us your favourite german movies?
CN:
I would like to point out three films by the most important German director of
the immediate post-war, Helmut Käutner: In jenen Tagen (Seven Journeys, 1947); Bildnis
einer Unbekannten (Portrait of an Unknown Woman, 1954); Die Rote (Redhead,
1962). The quality of these films, that reveal a true modernist, inventor of
forms, and poetic filmmaker, shows how the History of Cinema is far from being
written.
CL: I consider it impossible to name
just one film since there’s a lot of different kinds of cinema I appreciate
very much. As Carlos mentions post-war cinema I find a lot of East German film
productions of those decades and until the late eighties also very remarkable.
One of the most thought-provoking filmmakers for me was for sure Harun Farocki,
just as much in his documentary and essayist work as in his collaboration in
Christian Petzold’s fiction films. Haneke‘s DAS WEISSE
BAND marked me a lot, but I could also mention filmmakers like Angela Schanelec
or the Austrian documentarist Ruth Beckermann.
From
your pespective, how much has KINO changed since its inception?
CL:
It grew from a small film week with only German cinema to something much more
diverse in terms of the countries it represents but also cinematically
speaking. The context also changed a lot, there’s many more festivals and
platforms nowadays so we can give more space to less well known filmmakers.
What
fresh take do you believe the "Visões" section brings to the KINO
programming?
CL:
With the introduction of sections was
important to us to give a little bit more orientation to the audience: Visões
is where you find more classic narrative cinema and some of the big names of
German filmmaking, in Perspetivas you can see more experimental films or works
that challenge our ways of seeing - and in both you can discover some of the
young filmmakers. Last not least, Foco is dedicated to an author or topic.
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| DasVorspiel by Ina Weisse |
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