Format: Cinema

Date: 2 December 2009

Venues: Curzon Soho, London

Screening as part of the 12th Festival of German Films, 27 November-3 December 2009

Directors: Fatih Akin, Wolfgang Becker, Sylke Enders, Dominik Graf, Martin Gressmann, Christoph Hochhäusler, Romuald Karmakar, Nicolette Krebitz, Dani Levy, Angela Schanelec, Hans Steinbichler, Isabelle Stever, Tom Tykwer, Hans Weingartner

Original title: Deutschland 09 – 13 kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation

Germany 2009

151 mins

12th Festival of German Films website

The idea behind Germany 09 is intriguing. In 1978, the core members of the New German Cinema joined forces to respond to the shocking events related to RAF terrorism and the social atmosphere of the time in the gripping omnibus film Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst). Thirty years later, a number of the country’s current leading filmmakers have set out on a new collaborative venture to take the pulse of the nation and put across their perception of Germany today. Working in a free-spirited manner similar to their predecessors’ regarding the format and content of the films, the participating directors, gathered together by filmmaker and co-initiator Tom Tykwer, find themselves confronted with a different challenge: without a controversial issue like the Baader-Meinhof terror of the 70s to comment on, they must present their views of a country that, at least on the surface, appears to be in fairly healthy shape compared to many of its European counterparts. Consequently, the result is patchy, yet engaging in its own right. The blend of satire, documentary, fictional dramatic vignettes and essayistic episodes is just as boldly diverse in terms of the themes explored, and the 13 shorts range from straightforward political statements such as Fatih Akin’s Being Murat Kurnaz to Christoph Hochhäusler’s lingering, surreal sci-fi parable Séance and, most remarkably, Romuald Karmakar’s weird but strangely charming documentary Ramses, about a disillusioned Iranian sex bar owner in Berlin who takes a trip down memory lane.

Germany 09 is screening as part of the Festival of German Films at the Curzon Soho on December 2. Electric Sheep’s Pamela Jahn took part in a round table with Tom Tykwer and Fatih Akin at the Berlinale in February where the film had its world premiere.

Question: What was your intention in creating a filmic retrospective of the ‘state of the nation’ at this particular time?

Tom Tykwer: I think the point is that you look from the inside. If you go abroad, people will say things like, ‘what’s your problem? Germany is doing fine, why do you complain?’ and by comparison this is probably true. But if you live here, you realise that there is something happening in the country, that it feels like we are in transition, and of course these are things that are bothering us. If we take ourselves seriously as artists with some sort of political perspective, it’s natural that we relate to the place where we grew up and now live in. Germany is the place that feeds our stories, so I was trying to get a group of people together who wanted to analyse this in more detail. And it was also very important to me to do this in the form of short films because of the kind of spotlight effect it has, and because I believe it also reflects on where our ideas for major projects derive from.

Q: Tom, your short film is about a sales manager who spends most of his week flying around the world on business. Is the film connected to the way you see yourself in Germany?

TT: I think there is some of my personal experience in it, but most of all I realised that now that everybody uses cheap flights, and you can get on a plane and fly anywhere anytime you want, you really have to put some substantial effort into experiencing difference and also into experiencing ‘home’. And to me this is scary, and it’s that feeling that I wanted to explore a bit more in the film.

Q: The perspective of the film as a whole seems much more global, rather than specifically concerned with a German subject…

TT: I don’t think you can generalise it like this. To me Ulrike Meinhof, for example, is particularly German; the Murat Kurnaz subject is extremely German; or take Dany Levy’s film, made by a Jew who lives in Berlin and who has all these experiences and the paranoia that are particularly Jewish in Germany. So if you investigate the whole film in all its details, I think it is very ‘German’. But, at the same time – and my film might be the most representative of this – it is a Germany in this so-called new world, which has become a place that is much more uniform than it was 30 years ago.

Q: Fatih, why did you choose the case of Murat Kurnaz as your contribution to the project?

Fatih Akin: After Tom called me and told me about the project, I didn’t have an idea right away. It took me quite a while because I was in the middle of shooting Soul Kitchen and I completely dismissed the scale of the project, to be honest – there was even a point where I wanted to get out of it because I was too busy. Eventually I discovered the biography of Murat Kurnaz, and a production company that had just bought the rights to the story asked me if I would direct it, although I didn’t accept the offer at first. But when I read the book, I got so angry and disillusioned, especially about the fact that the German government decided at that time to leave him in Guantánamo, I just felt I had to react to that in some way. Germany has this very clean and correct image, but if you look a bit deeper and scratch the surface, you see these things. It was also very personal for me, because Kurnaz has the same background as me, he is German-Turkish, he was born in Bremen and I was born in Hamburg, and I simply felt that what happened to him could have happened to me too. There was this deep identification with the subject.

Q: Is there a collective argument or atmosphere that underlies all episodes?

TT: I see it more as a gesture, a gesture that is related to the main subject. It’s not hysterical, it’s not in panic, but it’s doubtful and it’s cautious, and it’s very perceptive of what’s going on. There is a certain attentiveness about everyone involved with our country, and I think that is the general attitude that underlies the individual films.

Q: What kind of impact has an omnibus film like this for you as filmmakers?

TT: I think the power of a project like this is that, if people who are actually in the middle of doing other things, shooting or working on their major projects, if all these directors make an effort and collaborate, the result can be quite amazing. Fatih, for example, did something that is very unusual for him, very structured, and very disciplined, with an abstract, yet fascinating idea behind it. Sometimes the circumstances make the style, and in this case it had this very lucky outcome. And I love the energy that the film has.

Q: Fatih, you mentioned how busy you were when Tom asked you to participate in Germany 09. Why didn’t you say ‘no’, why did you want to be part of it?

FA: One of the reasons why I agreed to take part in this project was that I always complain about the lack of dialogue between German filmmakers. And I say that although I am the one who usually runs away from all that, but it was a great experience. At the beginning, when we had the first meetings with the other directors, I had a terrible feeling, I suddenly thought it was like school. But even if, in the end, we actually didn’t talk so much with each other while shooting our films, within the making process on the whole there was a sort of dialogue I was involved in like everybody else in the group, no matter how busy we were. And it was beautiful to see that there is a dialogue, that it is possible. I got really inspired by this.

Format: Cinema

Screening on: 14 November 2009

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Writers: Park Eun-kyo, Park Wun-kyo, Bong Joon-ho

Original title: Madeo

Cast: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin

South Korea, 2009

128 mins

Part of Bong Joon-ho retrospective, 2-14 November 2009

Korean Film Festival

1-18 November 2009

Barbican + BFI Southbank (London), Manchester Cornerhouse, Nottingham Broadway

Korean Film Festival website

A dark tale about a mother who will go to extreme lengths to save her son, and a stunning blend of bewildering intensity, daring artistry and storytelling magic, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother was one of the highlights at the London Film Festival in October. Gladly, it is now already back on the big screen in the UK as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival, playing at the BFI, which is hosting a retrospective of Bong’s small but remarkable oeuvre so far. Mother features a striking central performance from Korean TV actress Kim Hye-ja as the vigilant mother whose 28-year-old son, a shy and mentally impaired young man, finds himself framed for murder. Although there is no real evidence against him, the police are eager to close the case, and his mother has no alternative but to get involved to prove his innocence. But how far will a mother go to save her son? And how did one of South Korea’s most promising young filmmakers, who recently smashed Korean box office records with monster movie The Host (2006) approach such a topic?

Pamela Jahn had the pleasure to take part in a round table interview of Bong Joon-ho at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in May, where Mother had its world premiere in the non-competitive Un Certain Regard section.

Q: You’ve been working on this film for almost five years, yet it seems fuelled with burning passion from beginning to end.

A: Yes, I had the general idea for the story even before The Host and I wrote a first synopsis in early 2004. That was also when I first met the main actress, Kim Hye-ja. And the fact that we could finally work together as director and actress was an unbelievable experience for me. So even while I was working on The Host and on the episode I contributed to Tokyo! (2008), in the back of my head I was already working on Mother too.

Q: When did you make the decision to cast Kim Hye-ja in the lead role?

A: It was not like the usual procedure where after writing the script I start looking for an actress who might fit the role. It’s this actress who really inspired me and got me to write the story in the first place. She is not very well known abroad, but in Korea she is an almost mythical actress, like the ‘mother of the nation’, and I had been a fan of hers since I was little. The first time I met Hye-ja it was a little surreal actually, she was almost like a dreamer. She was completely different from what I had seen on TV. So in reaction to this I wanted to show her in a role that is completely the opposite of her TV appearances and express her personality from a different point of view, looking at the hysteria and madness that lie beneath the surface of her great gentleness and warmth.

Q: How much influence did Kim Hye-ja have in the development of her character in the film?

A: I met her on a regular basis while writing the script, often several times a month, and I took some pictures that helped me a lot writing the story and developing her role.

Q:Did you also have Won Bin in mind for the role of the son while working on the story?

A: No, it was only after I finished the script that I started looking for an actor to play the son. For this character I wanted someone who would fit with her, but also someone who could make her completely mad, and Won Bin turned out to be the perfect match.

Q:In both its tone and narrative structure, Mother is very different from the films you directed before, like Memories of Murder (2003) or The Host. Why this shift in direction?

A: In Memories of Murder I wanted to represent Korean society in the 80s when it was under military dictatorship, and I liked the fact that I was dealing with a number of different themes like the family and the system, and I was exposing Korean society and the military regime by looking into the serial killings. But I got a bit tired of what was mainly a stylistic exercise and a general denunciation. So in Mother I wanted to tell a story that could be seen almost as if through a magnifying glass where the light is so concentrated that it can burn paper. I wanted to find the essence of the story. So the relationship between mother and son is the focus, and every element in the story, from the murder in the village to some other minor incidents, is there to explore this relationship in its entirety. But if you look at the film on the whole, it is not just about motherhood and their relationship, it also hints at something greater again.

Q: Did you feel a lot of pressure while making the film given that it was your follow-up feature to The Host, which was the biggest box office hit in Korean film history?

A: To be honest, I am a little bit uncomfortable with that, and I really hope that there will be a Korean movie coming up soon to break the record. But it didn’t bother me while I was making Mother because I started working on the project way before The Host came out in Korea, so I could maintain the tone that I had intended for this film in the first place.

Q: Mother is very distinctive in style, especially in the way attention is paid to colour and locations, but there are also these wonderful moments when the mother somehow becomes isolated from the background. What was the main focus in terms of the aesthetics of the film?

A: I wanted to put the character in an extreme situation and find out how she would react. That was the most important thing for me, so everything had to fully focus on the mother character, including the style and look of the film but also the music. We had some wild discussions with the art director about the clothes that she wears and what colour could best describe her character and her thoughts. I think that the opening scene shows this very well – her madness and the feeling that she is completely out of this world. She is wearing these weird purple clothes and she is hiding her hand in her pocket. Then we hear the sound of her cutting herbs and we see blood on her finger… so, basically, it’s all in there: the fate, the tragedy and the madness. These are the main elements I tried to express in that first scene, but they also stand for the film as a whole.

Q: How is your relationship to your own mother? Did she serve as an inspiration here?

A: Well, she didn’t kill anybody [laughs]. Actually, she hasn’t seen the movie yet, and I am very excited but also a little bit worried because she also has a tendency to obsession. I mean, I am 40 years old and she is still constantly worried about me. So, yes, in some way my mother also inspired me in making the film I guess, but not primarily. And don’t tell her I said that.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 August 2009

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Writer: Mark Boal

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pierce, Ralph Fiennes

USA 2008

131 mins

After the submarine thriller K:19 and a seven-year absence from the big screen, Kathryn Bigelow returns with a vengeance with The Hurt Locker, an intense and riveting film that looks at the psychology of war as seen from the perspective of a small US army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad. Written by journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, the film is both a psychological drama and a stunningly constructed thriller set against the backdrop of a war, which happens to be in Iraq. Bigelow here eschews cinematic embellishment while also avoiding any judgment or commentary on the actual conflict, an approach that has generated some controversy.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table interview with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal to talk about the making of the film, the psychological profile of people who deal with bombs and why more journalists should move into film.

Question: The Hurt Locker is based on Mark’s experience as a journalist ’embedded’ with an EOD unit [‘Explosive Ordnance Disposal’] in Baghdad in 2004 and has a very visceral, documentary quality. Once you had the script in place, how quickly did you formulate the visual style of the film?

Kathryn Bigelow: It came from constant dialogue with Mark and wanting to protect the reportorial underpinnings of it, and not have it feel too aestheticised. In other words, the real objective was: How do you put the audience in the journalist’s position, into the Humvee, into the eyes of the observer? I wanted to make it as experiential as possible, and give the audience a kind of boots-on-the-ground look at the day in the life of a bomb tech in Baghdad in 2004. So, basically, all the aesthetics came from the reporting, and the geography. It was very important for me to make sure the audience understands the geography of any given situation. The ground troops contain an area that is possibly about 300 meters, and then the EOD tech in the bomb suit takes what is called the ‘lonely walk’. The war has stopped for him and he has no idea what he’s walking towards – there is no margin for error. This in itself is such a harrowingly dramatic piece that it didn’t require a lot of cinematic embellishment.

Q: The way you use actors in the film is remarkable. Despite brief but striking appearances by Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes, the cast is made of relatively unknown actors, who all deliver outstanding performances. Was that particular mixture of both unfamiliar faces and big names an important part of the process?

KB:I think that an audience approaches a particular actor within his or her relative stature with a degree of expectation, and if that actor is going to come in harm’s way you think, ‘Oh, well, it will be dangerous, it might be tense, but they’re going to survive’. But if you take that out of the equation it definitely amplifies the tension.

Mark Boal: Yeah, we were really trying to mirror the unpredictability of the environment and that was just one way to do that. Besides, it helped financially (laughs).

Q: The film was shot in Jordan. How did you go about casting locally?

KB: We had a wonderful casting director. She was located in Jordan, and in Amman at the time there were about 750,000 Iraqi refugees. So we had access through her to the people, and some of them were actually actors. For example, the suicide bomber at the end of the film was actually an apparently fairly well-known actor in Baghdad before the occupation, who at the time we were shooting was a refugee in Amman, and we put him in the movie and he gave this incredibly emotive performance. That was one of the real, true surprises. We knew that where we were going we would find phenomenal locations and all that, but a surprise like that is really gratifying.

Q: The film opens with the quote, ‘for war is a drug’, and the story reveals that the soldiers are not solely motivated by a desire to do a good job. What really makes people choose to work as a bomb tech?

MB: Well, there are many different characters in the movie, but certainly one of the themes of the film is that combat, in addition to being a horrifying and awful experience, is also quite alluring to some people. And that’s perhaps one of the reasons why it continues to be a dominant feature of all cultures through all times, that it provides a certain amount of meaning for people – it’s a factory that produces giant existential experiences for some people. That’s definitely one aspect of the film, but it’s not an exclusive explanation for why anybody would do this job. There are other characters who have different motivations, some of them are quite selfish, some of them are quite selfless, for some it’s just about getting through the day and getting home, and for some it’s about the pleasure that you might take from having a high-risk occupation. So, I think it’s quite complicated and very hard to generalise, but it’s something we wanted to portray because we felt that it’s completely opposite in a volunteer army. We wanted to look at some of the reasons why people chose to go into combat situations, why they are drafted there – it’s a life choice.

Q: The film doesn’t seem to take any sides or offer any political view of the occupation unlike other films about Iraq that came out of Hollywood. How big a decision was this for you? Or was it simply more important to you to portray the humanity of it all?

KB:I think the humanity was definitely what was most important, to look at the individual and how he copes with an extremely, almost unimaginably risky situation. And I think of him more as a kind of non-political partisan – he’s not a Republican or a Democrat. But regardless of where you are, this conflict has just been so politicised. For me, if the film can remind you that there are men and women who right now are taking that ‘lonely walk’ and that they are risking their lives out there – regardless of what you feel about whether they should be there or not be there – I think that’s a pretty important emotional and political take-away.

Q: Both the editing and the sound are pretty remarkable: one can almost feel the impact of the explosions. How much of the film was actually shaped after the shooting?

KB: Sound was critical to both of us going into the project. We met with our sound designer, Paul Ottosson, before we went out to Jordan to shoot the film, and we knew that sound would play a bigger role in many respects than score. A score is repetitive, music is naturally rhythmic, and rhythm, even asymmetrical rhythm, creates a pattern. But a pattern can actually defuse tension, because you repeat it over and over again. However, if you take all that away it’s just like having an unfamiliar face. And I wanted the sound to be just as full as the image, it was very important to me that it would be almost physically honest. I tried to create a fundamental understanding of what that man in the bomb suit is experiencing emotionally, physically and psychologically as he approaches the kill zone and the bomb itself.

Q: Are you planning to work together again in the future?

KB: Actually we are working on something that Mark is writing, so hopefully we’ll revisit this combination again. The story takes place in South America in a region that is called the triple frontiers where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet, and this is a fairly lawless area, so hence potentially a very rich environment for drama.

Q: Will you be keeping the same style for the next project?

KB: If it suits the material, yes. I like that style a lot because it allows for some kind of experiential filmmaking, it puts you right in there. That is one of the great things that film can do and that no other medium can. Film can create this almost preconscious physiological reaction to something. Also, I think there is something extremely intriguing in being able to parachute the audience into a particular moment that he or she may not necessarily want to experience first-hand, like walking towards a ticking bomb… I know, I certainly wouldn’t want to walk towards one (laughs).

Q: What was the main difference between shooting action scenes for The Hurt Locker and your earlier films like Near Dark or Point Break?

KB: The real important difference here was the realism and the responsibility – this is a conflict that is still going on. And the fact that it is reportorially based, I think those are the three features that were unique from me and obviously a big departure from something as fictional as Point Break. It’s all been imaginative, or fantastical, or historical. So far I haven’t had the liberty and ‘luxury’ of first-hand observation and the opportunity to work on material that is potentially topical and relevant – I love it. And if some more journalists would move into film, I think film would be a better place.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Still: Madame X – An Absolute Ruler

Screening at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

25 March – 8 April 2009

BFI Soutbhank, London

Festival website

A nice surprise in the line-up of this year’s London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival was a mini-retrospective of German director Ulrike Ottinger’s extensive body of work. The three features and one documentary that were screened offered a brief insight into the fantastic, colourful and stylised universe she creates. One of the most important women filmmakers to emerge from the experimental fringe of New German Cinema in the late 1970s, Ottinger initially worked as a painter and photographer in Paris in the 60s before turning to film. In 1977, she made Madame X – An Absolute Ruler (Madame X – Eine absolute Herrscherin), a ferocious exploration of traditional role models that is often referred to as a ‘lesbian feminist pirate movie’. Ottinger used the pirate genre as an ironic framework for her distinctive visual style. The film stars underground icon Tabea Blumenschein as a spike-fisted, leather-clad dominatrix and caused a stir when it was first shown on German television.

Most of Ottinger’s subsequent narrative films also focus on exceptional female characters: from Orlando, a symbolic figure who changes sex and lives over several centuries (Freak Orlando, 1981) to Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia (1989) and Dorian Gray, played by the actress and model Veruschka von Lehndorff in Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse, 1984). However, the term ‘feminist film’ doesn’t suffice to describe the unique narrative blend of her futuristic fairy tales and sumptuous cinematic voyages. Vigorously independent, Ottinger acts as writer, director and producer of all her films, including documentaries in which she has explored her fascination with both the traditional and unusual aspects of contemporary culture, following the minorities and outcasts of Berlin as they crossed the newly fallen wall between East and West in Countdown (1990) or migrating with Mongolian nomads across the Taiga forest (Taiga, 1992). Pamela Jahn spoke to Ulrike Ottinger during the LLGFF in April 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your films come out of a tradition of fantasy and surrealist filmmaking. What sparked your interest in the unreal?

Ulrike Ottinger: It is true that my films are often set in futuristic landscapes and create a surreal imagery, but my inspirations often come from reality, from observing the world, the people, their different cultures and traditional role patterns. In film, however, you can’t show things just ‘as they are’, you have to do something with it, you have to condense reality. When I first started making films, I soon became very fascinated with the idea of using fragments of reality in a collage process, including my personal experiences, often related to my travels, but also references to literature, art and art history. The viewer then has to add his or her own imagination to make it all work. I’m interested in so many things and I like to show this in my films. I’m playing with genres and with citations but what is most important in the end is how these things come together. So in a way, fiction and fantasy are always frighteningly close to reality in my films, and vice versa.

PJ: How did your experience as an artist, especially in Paris in the 1960s, influence your work as a filmmaker?

UO: Of course, this was the time of the Structuralists in France. So I saw a lot of films, not only the nouvelle vague, but the older German Expressionist cinema, which I liked a lot, and also some early American independent cinema. It was all a bit like ‘learning by seeing’, and I don’t think I would have developed this strong desire to make films if I had only been able to see the so-called ‘commercial cinema’. On the other hand, through my work as an artist, I have become extremely sensitised to visual images. I construct my films with images. Before I started shooting Freak Orlando, for example, I took hundreds of photographs with the actress Magdalena Montezuma, who I’ve done several films with. She’s also worked with Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter. I always make a lot of photographic studies to work around a certain theme and to find interesting images.

PJ: Another connection between your films seems to be a fascination for excessive female characters, as in Madame X in particular, where the crew on the pirate ship is composed of a very bizarre collection of extreme women. Did you have a set concept in mind before you started making the film or did it ultimately develop out of the collaboration with the female cast?

UO: When I started working on the film, I actually wanted to use completely different women. But then Yvonne Rainer, who plays Josephine de College in the film, happened to have a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship in Berlin at the time and when I met her, I thought she was perfect to play the part of the artist. Then there was this very famous prostitute from Zurich, Irene von Lichtenstein, who had worked with many artists before. I got to know her through Schroeter, and so I used her as the photo model character ‘Blow Up’. Lutze is another artist, who was living in the Lower East Side in New York at the time, and she was just wonderful in her role as the American housewife; there was also the woman who looked like she was from Tahiti – she wasn’t actually from there, but it was great to have her in the film as the ‘native’ character. So we got together all these different kinds of women, but there was an enormous amount of stylisation. It was an unbelievable coming together and it was perfect in its character composition.

PJ: It was bound to create controversy.

UO: Oh, yes, I think people today can no longer understand the kind of shock this film was for the public. I never again had such an extreme reaction from the audience to a film.

PJ: Did you expect that kind of reaction? Did you intend to provoke people with your films at the time?

UO: Absolutely not, I was completely shocked myself, you know, because for me it was a very playful film with a lot of sympathy but also a lot of humour in it. Although I was confronting something that was not talked about openly until then, it was the form more than the theme that was so shocking, and that made people have such strong feelings about it. The film was first shown at prime time on German television and I received thousands of letters afterwards. And people from all over the country turned up in front of my house in a tiny street in Berlin to speak with me because they went crazy after seeing the film. I was absolutely amazed by this, it was a huge surprise for me.

PJ: What is so striking in Madame X is the contradiction of the role itself, Madame X as a master but also as a promise of freedom.

UO: When I returned from Paris in 1969 it was the height of the student movement and the women’s movement, and my theory about feminism was to find alternatives, and not to be caught again in a cage. However, I found some of the new figureheads or leaders of the movement just built new cages by setting new rules and limits, like Madame X in a way. This is why some women said that the film was against the feminists’ movement, but, of course, it wasn’t, quite the contrary. But although I find the movement itself very important, I think we need to be aware of the power of traditional patterns, and this is what Madame X is about too. It took a while for people to understand that there was an artistic freedom in my films. In the beginning, some of the women in the movement only wanted a film that would clearly and ideologically fit into their line like a political slogan, but this is not the way I make films.

PJ: Your latest documentary, The Korean Wedding Chest, just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, but I believe you’re already in the middle of shooting your next film called The Blood Countess, a vampire story.

UO: Yes, I’m very excited about this film. I wrote it a long time ago, but never had enough money to make it and so I made other things in between. As often in my films, it is very inspired by location, by the history of these locations, which, in this case, is already so crazy that it makes for a great film. And, yes, it’s a vampire film set in Vienna, which depicts a dark part of the history of the royal Habsburg family. It will also include some documentary elements, but of course it’s a fantasy fiction story.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Title: The Heart Is a Dark Forest

Screening at: Birds Eye View

Date: 6-7 March 2009

Director: Nicolette Krebitz

Writer: Nicolette Krebitz

Original title: Das Herz ist ein dunkler Wald

Cast: Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Franziska Petri

Germany 2007

86 mins

Birds Eye View website

This year’s Birds Eye View Festival opened with German writer-director Nicolette Krebitz’s second feature The Heart Is a Dark Forest, a daring, darkly stylish and artfully constructed marital drama centring on a woman’s emotional meltdown after she finds her illusions about bourgeois family life shattered forever. Vacillating between social realism, emotional tragedy and mysticism, Krebitz (who is best known in Germany as an actress) dissects what lies underneath the grid of social roles in contemporary society through an increasingly surreal modern-day version of Medea that is not always easy to digest, both formally and thematically.

With a mesmerising Nina Hoss and Devid Striesow in the lead roles, who last performed together in Christian Petzold’s remarkable thriller Yella, the film centres on Marie, who one morning accidentally discovers that her husband has a double life, with a second wife and little child in another suburban house just like hers. Utterly shaken and bewildered, Marie escapes into the nearby forest where she passes out. After returning to her children, strangely calm and collected, she attends a masked ball held in a friend’s country mansion in a scene reminiscent of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. There, she confronts her tragic fate and the inner demons that haunt her.

Pamela Jahn spoke to Nicolette Krebitz during the Birds Eye View Festival in March 2009.

Pamela Jahn: Your film is based on a tragedy of betrayal and focuses on a woman whose love ultimately leads to her destruction. What attracted you to this kind of subject matter?

Nicolette Krebitz: I saw Medea on stage and read the play again when I started working on a new script, so the story comes partly from Medea, and partly from some real-life cases that I discovered during my research. I found out that there were basically two different types of women, two different reactions, when they found out about the double lives of their partners. The first type just remained silent and never said a word about it, not even to their children, for fear of losing their husbands and the lives they lived. The second type of women reacted in a very extreme manner, most of them tried to kill themselves, and I was shocked by this. I started asking myself all these questions: Why would they do it? What’s the point? Are there really no more reasons to go on living? My conclusion was that it must have had a major impact on their desire for being wanted, being needed, and that it has something to do with their roles as mothers in society. They must have felt betrayed also in the way that they had given their lives and bodies to build a family, to become mothers and to raise children… It’s still a big deal, I think. And it’s this archaic feeling that caused such an extreme reaction, that I found very fascinating.

PJ: The metaphoric title perfectly matches the theme and the increasingly gloomy atmosphere you’re creating in your film. What does the image mean to you?

NK: Neither the man nor the woman in the film is to blame for what they do because of love. Most of the time, you don’t really know what it is that you love, or what you long for. Basically, you just don’t really know what you want when you love, and this for me is like a dark forest. It implies a lot of things that are hidden or invisible, but they are all part of what we call love…

PJ: In addition to the literary and cinematic references such as the masquerade scene in the castle, the film also has many theatrical elements, in particular the scenes in which Marie plays out her memories with Thomas on a sparse Brechtian stage. What was the idea behind this?

NK: To me the scenes that take place on a stage are the ones that draw the audience into the story. I think they are very necessary because they are the only moments were you see Marie and her husband Thomas, happy or not happy, but actually together. The rest of the film focuses on Marie and her point of view. To me these scenes are the soul of the film, because you see what their life as a couple has been, you witness their conversations, and thus you realise that everything that happens was mentioned before. It’s like psychoanalysis, when you reconstruct the past and look at what really has been said and done, and then you compare this to what you’ve built up in your mind.

PJ:Although we’re drawn into what happens to Marie and how she tries to cope with the situation, it seems that in a subtle way we’re also kept at a distance from her…

NK:Yeah, we change perspectives when we follow Marie. Sometimes we are inside of her, looking through her eyes, and sometimes we are spectators of the whole scenario. What I tried to do here was shifting between being part of society and being part of the person involved in this tragedy. And I think it’s important to get this distance from her, because she does something very cruel in the end.

PJ:Was it always your intention to end the film in such a surreal, nightmarish way?

NK:I don’t see it as unreal as a nightmare would be…It’s reality. Of course it is not a documentary, it’s a fiction film, and I tried to not let the audience down by being too…grey. But what fascinated me most was the fact that, if there is somebody just like you and an entire situation that mirrors your own life, you could just as well be deleted, because you are no longer of any use. This is how Marie feels, and this is because she had already given up on everything. It is possibly the most irrational decision and the darkest way to end this story, but my aim with this was to provoke a discussion in the audience.

PJ:What sort of reaction did you get from the German audience, especially women?

NK:A lot of women said they were very touched by the whole story, even the ending. Of course, they said they wouldn’t have gone that far, but they know that this is how it feels, and maybe it’s what they forbid themselves to do. But they could allow themselves to think about it through the movie…it’s a relief in a way. Because society expects all these things from a mother, and sometimes it’s just too much. And by the end of the day it’s a story about two people, a man and a woman, and too often it is down to the woman to deal with the situation.

PJ:You’ve recently contributed to a film called Germany 09: 13 Short Films about the State of the Nation, which premiered at the Berlinale in February, and your segment, ‘The Unfinished’, tells the story of a young writer who travels back in time to meet with Ulrike Meinhof and Susan Sontag in 1969. Do you feel an urge to make films about women or women’s issues in your work as a writer-director?

NK:I’m a woman and I tell stories and make films, and I think the film industry needs more women because they make different films. It’s a way of showing even to the male audience how we are, how we see things, how we feels things in order to understand it instead of treating women like objects or reduce them to being only mothers or only daughters. Yeah, so that’s my contribution but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I will also make films that deal with emancipation issues. It can be anything, but it will always be seen and told through my eyes.

Interview by Pamela Jahn