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17th KINO (2020) - Interview

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.

Full programme and more infos: https://www.goethe.de/ins/pt/pt/kul/sup/kpo.html

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.

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. 

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.

DasVorspiel by Ina Weisse