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GERMAN CINEMA
he scenario reads like something Tout of a blockbuster screenplay: “Mogul drops dead, business
revenues plunge, a serious
new threat looms, an entire industry teeters, and an extremely unlikely hero emerges to save the day at the very last minute”.
This is the German film industry following the sudden death in January of Bernd Eichinger, arguably the most influential producer in German cinematic history. No one had his knack for combining critical acclaim and box-office biz the way he did.
For 30 years, starting when he was barely 30, he broke one taboo
after another and morphed Constantin film into an international player. Conventional wisdom said a German children's book could not be filmed in English and make money. But he did both with The NeverEnding Story, creating a classic still watched by kids of all ages.
Then he took an imminently unfilmable 1,000-page Italian novel about murderous Medieval monks and dumbfounded the naysayers with The Name of the Rose.
And when they said no German should portray Hitler as anything but a fiend, he made a movie which showed Hitler as a human being – albeit a fa- tally flawed one – who liked scrambled eggs and puppies. And the critics and the audiences applauded Der Untergang (Downfall).
Angst-filled German filmmakers are now wondering who might fill Eichinger's shoes, especially with box- office ticket sales currently in a nose dive. Box office was down a whopping 13.5 per cent in Germany in 2010, worse than in any of the 23 European Union (EU) nations.
Even worse, funding for the EU's MEDIA film subsidy programme runs out in 2013, and subsidy-depending German filmmakers are already fretting over what might happen if the 20-year- old programme is not renewed.
Add to that a German federal government which is grimly deter- mined to "digitalise" every cinema in the country, pushing up ticket prices in the process, and the German film industry finds itself facing the biggest crisis in decades.
Cue the unlikely hero: comic actor/director/producer Til Schweiger, who is defying a box-office downturn by drawing the crowds to his latest Billy Wilder-style romantic comedy. Best known to the public for his comic roles, he also appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds in 2009, racking up more ticket sales that year than any other German actor has in any year for four decades.
Now Schweiger's Kokowääh (the German phonetic spelling of "coq au vin") is pulling them in and topping the
box-office charts. The square-jawed 47- year-old thesp, whose uncharacteristi- cally mellifluous German voice has been compared to James Stewart's, not only starred in the pic, but also helmed and produced it.
"So many great comedic geniuses fled Germany or were murdered," Schweiger said in a TV talk show. "For decades German film comedies were blah. Now it's about time that this lost art form was revived in Germany."
In the first 10 days of its release, Kokowääh sold two million tickets, an astronomical figure in a downturn market in this nation of 80 million.
Schweiger represents a whole new breed of filmmakers who reflect the changing tastes and demography of post-unification Germany. Another is Fatih Akin, a 37-year-old Turkish German director whose light comedic touch has transformed such unpalat- able subjects as illegal immigration and Islamic radicalism into box-office gold in Germany. Four million ethnic Turks live in Germany, making them the country's largest minority.
With poignant-yet-funny films like Soul Kitchen (DoP Rainer Klausmann on FujiFilm F-64, ETERNA 250D/500), Akin has now straddled German society's ethnic boundaries, hitting hard at social issues whilst making audiences laugh - and making them pay good money to do so.
Romance and a light touch was the theme of Philipp Stözl's Goethe, a biopic focusing on the German bard's early love life and shot by DoP Kolja Brandt on FujiFilm F-64 ETERNA 250D / Vivid 500.
Yet Akin, Schweiger and the others of this new breed are heavily dependent on federal and EU subsidies, and those subsidies are imperiled in cash-strapped, post-unification Germany. European countries struggling to shore up the economies of Greece, Spain and Portugal are cutting back on "expendables" such as the arts.
For two decades the EU's generous MEDIA programme has funneled millions to subsidize Euro- pean filmmakers. But when the pro- gramme comes up for renewal in 2013, funding could be sharply reduced, according to MEDIA head Aviva Silver.
"We are facing a very critical situation," Silver told a stunned audience of filmmakers during a meeting at the 61st Berlin Film Festival in February. With Germany bearing the brunt of the Athens bail-out deal, fed- eral officials are mulling serious cut- backs in funding for the FFA German film subsidy organisation which, in many cases, is the only thing keeping small production companies and independent filmmakers alive.
"Taking the axe to the FFA will jeopardize the German film industry in
FOCUSON
GERMANY
ERNEST GILL REPORTS FROM BERLIN ON THE FILM AND TELEVISION
PRODUCTION SCENE IN GERMANY INCLUDING THREE PRODUCTIONS ORIGINATED
ON FUJIFILM
Photo main: August Diehl and Nina Proll getting better acquainted in Buddenbrocks and inset above scenes from Soul-Kitchen (left) and Kokowããh (right)
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