BERLIN & BEYOND Mar. 2019

[Chris Knipp]

San Francisco Berlin & Beyond, March 8-14, 2019

This festival, showing at San Francisco's historic Castro cinema palace and the Geothe Institute, with some showings in Berkeley, is an excellent cure for winter movie doldrums and I was really impressed with the high quality and relevance of the films I have reviewed.

Every one of these six films I've reviewed in Filmleaf's Festival Coverage section is well worth your time. 303 is an adorable young romance + road trip, a very enjoyable movie, and your two hours will zip by. It may remind you of Richard Linklater's "Before" series, but it goes further; the two actors could be stand-ins for the young Kate Winslet and Heath Ledger, and their chemistry is palpable. The Waldheim Waltz is a conventional doc, but the subject, hiding complicity in Nazi crimes, as illustrated by the notorious case of UN Secretary General and then President of Austria Kurt Waldheim, is a perennially important one. Catch The Cakemaker if you missed it earlier, a sensuous gay romance and tour of the pastry kitchen. 3 Days in Quiberon is an elegant black and white film in very wide aspect ratio about a last interview given by the iconic Austrian, later French, movie star Romy Schneider, played wonderfully by Marie Bäumer. Chris the Swiss is an exploration of the filmmaker Anja Kofmel's lost cousin, a dashing young man who died at twenty-seven in the Balkan wars in 1992, when she was only ten, that uses animation with documentary and archival footage in a skillful and imaginatively stimulating mix. Finally, Gundermann recreates the life of a contradictory, soulful singer-songwriter of East Germany who did not sail through the end of communism untarnished, since an earlier link with the Stasi emerged. How he confronts his own mistakes makes the pivotal aspect of this song-filled movie.

Here are the links to my reviews:

LINKS:
303 ( Hans Weingartner 2018)
3 Days in Quiberon/3 Tage in Quiberon (Emily Atef 2018)
Cakemaker, The (Ofir Raul Graizer 2017)
Chris the Swiss (Anja Kofmel 2018)
Gundermann (Andreas Dresen 2018)
Waldheim Waltz, The/Waldheims Walzer (Ruth Beckermann 2018)