Clik here to view.
Festival season moves on and with Love Queer Cinema Week just about done, we're gearing up for yet another solid week of cinema screenings. This time it’s the turn of fifth German Film Festival, organized by the Goethe Institute in Beijing in collaboration with the company German Films, with screenings between Nov 10-19.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Expect a wide range of themes on the fifth edition of the institutionally sanctioned festival, ranging from screen adaptations of literary classics, reflections on gender and social issues and, of course, some international film festival favorites.
Also beware of the special section of short films comprised of titles taken from Berlinale and Jia screen short films, a program originally initiated by Chinese enfant terrible Jia Zhangke.
Click here to see the full program as well as times and venues, which this year include Goethe-Institut China, Broadway Cinematheque Moma, Beijing Star City Cinema, the China Film Archive, UCCA, and the Institut Français. Once the Beijing leg of the festival raps, it'll move onto Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Nanjing.
What to see?
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Beuys (2017, pictured at top) by Andres Veiel is a rich-in-detail documentary about the groundbreaking 20th-century German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys. Whether a newcomer or an expert on the remarkably charismatic character, expect some new light to be shed on the artist’s notably busy life (Nov 11 at Goethe-Institute; Nov 12 at UCCA).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
In the film Manifesto (2017) by Julian Rosefeldt, Cate Blanchett plays 13 separate characters, each delivering a different “manifesto,” which in themselves are dramatisations of the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels'Communist Manifesto, Jim Jarmusch's Golden Rules of Filmmaking, Werner Herzog's Minnesota Declaration, among other famous ideological declarations of purpose. You may assume such content would guarantee a ticket to snooze-land but the collaboration between Rosefeldt and Blanchett proves deeply humorous, resulting in a highly entertaining piece that according to critics, is “hard to classify,” but in a good way (Nov 13 at Beijing Star City Cinema; Nov 15 at MOMA).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Another screening hybrid worth mentioning is Variety by Ewald André Dupont. The expressionist silent film captures the tempestuous story between a former trapeze artist who must take care of a ruinous fairground attraction, and his newfound love with an orphan, for whom he decides to abandon his family. Add to this a live soundtrack by the Chinese rockers Chui Wan (read our recent interview with the band here), who have composed brand-new material for the occasion, and you've got a singular experience not to be missed (Nov 12 at China Film Archive).
Images: Zero One Film, Goethe-Institut China, Maybe Mars
