‘Film & TV’ Archives
Christiane F. & The Gropiusstadt
Sanna Akehurst visits Gropiusstadt to pay tribute to Christiane F’s Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo... There's a German author and cabaret artist by the name of Horst Evers who once suggested that if any of your acquaintances outside Berlin has the audacity to take your invitation to the city seriously and then insists you show them the sights, you should show them the view out of your flat window and ask them to kindly keep quiet so you can sleep off the rest of your hangover. I wouldn't [...]
Berlin’s Most Interesting Person
Paul Sullivan talks to Stuart Acker Holt about his Most Interesting Person project in Berlin... What makes a person interesting? It's a very good question, and one that a new 'long-trail' film series called Most Interesting Person (MIP) sets out to answer. A series of innovative films that provide insights into the lives of exceptional people and the impact they have had on our cultural landscape, the project has taken its founder Stuart Acker Holt to New York, LA, London, Sao Paulo, Tel [...]
Kino Babylon
William Thirteen pays tribute to one of Berlin's oldest and best-loved cinemas... When the Kino Babylon opened its doors in Spring of 1929 Berliners couldn't complain of a shortage of cinemas. If anything, there was a surplus. The Reichs-Kino-Addressbuch of that year gave the official count as 378, and there were already film palaces at Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Tor, as well as innumerable "flea cinemas" in nearby Münzstrasse. But by a fortuitous coincidence of urban planning and [...]
When Grandparents Fall in Love
Susan Bernofsky spends some time on Cloud 9... The East Berlin setting of German director Andreas Dresen’s 2008 film Cloud 9 doesn't particularly jump out at you. What we mostly see of it is the view from the window of the apartment that the film’s protagonist, 60-something-year-old Inge, shares with her partner of 30 years, showing the S-bahn tracks that come to stand for the ever-sameness of a marriage that has been stuck on the same track for years. Inge’s partner Werner [...]
In Praise of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat
Wyndham Wallace profiles a 1980s German TV epic... “History is written by the victors”, Winston Churchill once said, and as someone living in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s I grew up with an interpretation that deemed the Germans humourless warmongers whose crimes should never be forgotten. In the playground, the word ‘Nazi’ was virtually interchangeable with ‘German’. The ‘propaganda’ of the war-associated films and comic books I consumed as a child was so deeply [...]
