New French and German film festival

Neighbours – Nachbarn -Voisins!
The French-German Film Festival

This year, for the first time, the Goethe-Institut and the Embassy of France will hold a French-German Film Festival in Auckland Wellington and Christchurch.

The joint festival of ten films was inspired by the success of last year’s respective French and German Film Festivals.

Showing a complete lack of xenophobia the film which launched the festival was a German documentary set in St Petersburg with the participants speaking Russian. That it was made by a German was the only nationalistic aspect to it.

The film could be indirectly showing the superiority of German culture because what “Perestroika Reconstruction” showed was the chaos the can be Russia today.

The film examines the lives of five families who live in an apartment block in St Petersburg. They actually all live in one apartment where each the rooms have been sold off at one stage with each family inhabiting one room with a shared kitchen and bathroom.

The film follows the attempt by a Russian business woman to buy all of the shares in the apartment. It’s a process which takes forever but the Russians manage to maintain a degree of dignity and resignation. The film exposes the problems of housing in Russia but also the changing attitudes to both communism and capitalism.

One of the light, touching French comedies is Copacabana with Isabelle Huppert as Babou who seems to be able to shrug off anything. Real jobs, husbands, responsibilities,
who needs them?

But when she finds out that Esmeralda, her own daughter, is too ashamed of her to invite her to her wedding, Babou decides to make some changes. She starts a job selling time-shares at the Belgian seaside during the off-season and to her own surprise becomes the model employee. However, once again Babou is the cause of her own downfall.
At that point, she takes time out to reflect upon what it is that really matters to her.

Wellington gets the best of the festival with some extra films being shown at Te Papa. These are four classic films, two each from Germany and France.

The German ones are Fritz Lang's “M’ which starred Peter Lorre and Josef von Sternberg’s "The Blue Angel” featuring Marlene Dietrich.

The two classic French Films are Truffaut’s ”Jules and Jim” and the Alain Resnais’ 1997 film "Same Old Song”

Metropolis Cinema, Dunedin: 4 -10 November
Academy Cinemas, Auckland: 16 -23 November
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa: 13 -14 November
The Film Archive, Wellington: 23 November – 4 December