22nd New German Cinema Festival Opens in Ukraine

New German Cinema, a festival hosted by the Goethe-Institut and the Arthouse Traffic Company, opens on 13 October in the Kyiv Movie Theatre. The festival, which features the best German films of the past year, is one of the oldest of its kind in Ukraine, featuring cinematic work from one specific country. The event is a part of German Culture Week, which is sponsored in part by ProCredit Bank.

The festival begins with Toni Erdmann, an Oscar nominated tragicomedy directed by Maren Ade. Toni Erdmann was highly praised by critics and experts at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Palm and awarded the FIPRESCI Prize of the International Federation of Film Critics. Another film on the festival programme is Lars Kraume’s The People vs. Fritz Bauer, recipient of four German Film Academy Awards, the country’s highest cinema award, including the prize for best director. Other films on the programme include Greetings from Fukushima directed by Doris Dörrie, recipient of the European Film Academy Award in the Panorama category, as well as the Heiner Carow prize at the Berlinale Film Festival; Death to Hippies! Long Live the Punk!, a comedy drama set in Germany in the 1980s by Oskar Roehler, a three-time nominee for the Berlinale’s Golden Bear; Overgames, a documentary by Lutz Dammbeck and recipient of the Silver Dove award from the DOK Leipzig festival, which reveals the techniques of manipulating public consciousness through mass media. The New German Cinema programme also offers a collection of short films including the debut works of new directors as well as animated films by well-known German studios. Most of the films were featured during the Berlin Film Festival and the main event of the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.

Movie schedule (in Ukrainian) pdf, 2,86 MB The audience of New German Cinema in Kyiv will be presented with a retrospective of short films by Serhii Loznytsia, a Ukrainian director who has been living in Berlin since 2001. The festival will feature his early documentaries, which were shown at German film events and which drew the attention of the press.

During the festival, Kyiv will host German–Ukrainian Co-Productions: Problems and Opportunities, an event focusing on the issues of co-production and which promotes cooperation between the two countries using successful cinema projects as examples.

The New German Cinema festival will also take place in Dnipro, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Chernivtsi.