Titel.KINO 1/04.RV - german films

FAR AWAY AND
What makes great events so satisfying? The fact that they begin in a
small way, like everything else. One example is a story from exactly
a year ago. Visiting French distributors had just seen a film called
Good Bye, Lenin! at the Berlin Film Festival, and in fact, for a
German film, it wasn’t bad at all. The professionals acknowledged
afterwards that it might attract 100,000 viewers in France, but they
also hesitated. Who would have the courage to release such a film
– in France, where German cinema has been poison to the box
offices for years? Then suddenly, the man called ”Jeannot“ by the
big Parisian family of distributors charmingly begged his colleagues:
“Oh, let me have it, I have a space in my program at the moment.“
So Jean Hernandez, director of the young Océan Films
Distribution, secured himself the scoop of the year 2003 as casually
and cleverly as that – and Fabienne Vonier from Pyramide
Distribution related the tale at the first German-French film meeting
in Lyon in November 2003, to the great amusement of 150
specialists from the field. It was a modesty that was destined to pay:
Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! – deliberately marketed
as a German film available only in the original version with subtitles
– drew almost 1.5 million viewers to cinemas in France. ”That is
YET SO CLOSE:
GERMAN-FRENCH FILM RELATIONS
really tremendous,“ says Hernandez today – but the ”emotional
quality“ of the mother-son relationship before the background of
the fall of the Wall, a topic that fascinates people in France as well,
gives the film its simple conviction. Good Bye, Lenin!, Océan’s
first German film, thus became the first German-language blockbuster
in France for 22 years – since Uli Edel’s drug story We
Children from Bahnhof Zoo (Christiane F. – Wir
Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, almost 2.9 million viewers).
Generally speaking, 2003 was a year of international successes for
German cinema: an OSCAR for Caroline Link’s Nowhere in
Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika), Wolfgang Becker’s triumph
worldwide, the Coppa Volpi in Venice for the very German star,
Katja Riemann – perhaps this really has triggered the ”renaissance
of German film“ in France, too, as the French film magazine Positif
so obligingly predicted. On the other hand, it is of course true to
say: where there was scarcely anything left, even a little is a lot. But
what would a renaissance deserving the name actually signify? One
or two German films in the competition at Cannes each year, current
films by German directors everywhere in French cinemas, and
the number of viewers watching these running to six figures on a
kino 1 focus on german-french film relations
2004 4
Scene from ”Far Away So Close“ (photo courtesy of Filmbild Fundus)