Nandan to host German Film Fest
It will be held on March 11 and 12 at Nandan-III
With the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visiting India last month for cooperation talks between the two countries, Kolkata is gearing up to host a German Film Festival on March 11 and 12 at Nandan-III where it intends to present to the cinephiles specially-curated German movies.
The festival is being jointly hosted by the Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata and Forum for Film Studies and Allied Arts led by the eminent Bengali auteur Goutam Ghose. The festival is scheduled to screen a total of four German films over two days.
The typical characteristics of Eastern and Western European films are their historical elements, political oppression, and personal trauma. Having emerged from the Second World War ravaged and broken, German films most often contained subjects surrounding tragedy and separation. The New German Cinema genre, much akin to the French New Wave, sent ripples across the globe.
The country has given the world several gifted auteurs such as Volker Schlondorff, Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder etc.
Scheduled to be screened on March 11, the film ‘Das Schonste Paar’, directed by Sven Taddicken, explores a traumatic incident a couple faces during a vacation on a Mediterranean island. Even as the victims return to everyday lives despite the trauma, they soon seek revenge after spotting one of the perpetrators in their home town. The film digs deep into the fragile equilibrium of a relationship.
‘Freies Land’ by Christian Alvart shows Germany in an early post-Cold War time.
In the winter of 1992, somewhere in the ramshackle expanses of northeastern Germany, two investigators- one from the East and the other from the West- are supposed to solve the murder of two girls but end up deeper in the swamp of once-divided Germany.
On March 12, the two films to be screened are ‘Ich Und Kaminski’ and ‘Nightlife’. The show timings are 4 pm and 6 pm on both days. Uddata Mohan Bhattacharya, coordinator, German Film Archive, South Asia, Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata, will introduce the session on March 11, at 4 pm.
