Love and self-discovery
Filmfest Hamburg announces closing Film and further titles
31.08.2021
Jacques Audiard’s modern love story Paris, 13th District is this year’s closing film of FILMFEST HAMBURG. The Cannes competition entry will run in the “Voilà!” section.
“With this film we deliberately set a counterpoint to our opening film. While Great Freedom (Große Freiheit) by Sebastian Meise deals with unfree love in post-war Germany, Audiard’s contribution is a plea for freedom and multifaceted love in the 21st century,” says festival director Albert Wiederspiel.
In poetic black-and-white images, Jacques Audiard tells of the lives of young people in Paris. The paths of three women and one man cross. All four have different demands, longings and ideas about life and love. Paris, 13th District is based on two graphic novels by New York cartoonist Adrian Tomine. Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius co-wrote the screenplay.
Other films in the programme
After their world premieres at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, which starts tomorrow, 1 September, Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Hand of God and the satirical and near-future Land of Dreams by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari will be screened in Hamburg this autumn.
In Land of Dreams, the Iranian-American artist couple creates a dark but also surreal picture of a country in the near future that has been sealed off. The government is recording the dreams of its citizens in order to control and better understand the population. The film will be shown in the section “Transatlantik” and is nominated as a co-production with German participation (Bon Voyage Film, Hamburg) for the Hamburg Producer Award International Cinema Co-Productions.
In The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino moves between fellinesque absurdity and tragic seriousness. The life of the art- and cinema-loving 17-year-old Fabietto Schisa, who lives with his family in Naples in the 1980s, experiences a sudden break, which the passionate SSC Naples fan and Maradona admirer must learn to deal with.
After the world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, director and actor Kenneth Branagh will personally present his film Belfast about his childhood in Ireland in the late 1960s in Hamburg. The film, with a top-class cast including Judi Dench, Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan, tells the story of nine-year-old Buddy, who seeks and finds solace with his family, especially his grandmother, in his troubled Irish everyday life, which is marked by labour struggles.
The last weeks of an ageing couple in Paris are the subject of Gaspar Noé’s latest film Vortex, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. From two perspectives, the camera follows a man and his dementia-stricken wife in a split screen, showing their everyday lives and their slow farewell to each other.
Murina, the debut film that won the Camera d’Or in Cannes, focuses on the teenager Julija, who lives in a Croatian coastal town. Director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s film shows how the young girl gradually breaks away from her family, especially her imperious father, and takes her life into her own hands.
The films at a glance:
Belfast
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Great Britain, 2021
“Kaleidoskop”
Distributor: Universal
Cinema release: 9 December 2021
The Hand of God (È stata la mano di Dio)
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Italy, 2021
“Kaleidoskop”
Netflix
Land of Dreams
Director: Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari
USA, Germany, Qatar, 2021
“Transatlantik”
Murina
Director: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović
Croatia, Brazil, Slovenia, USA, 2021
“Kaleidoskop”
Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades)
Director: Jacques Audiard
France, 2021
“Voilà!”
Distributor: Neue Visionen
Vortex
Director: Gaspar Noé
France, Belgium, Monaco, 2021
“Voilà!”
FILMFEST HAMBURG will take place from 30 September to 9 October 2021. Around 100 productions from all over the world will be shown as European, German or Hamburg premieres. Festival cinemas are the Abaton, CinemaxX Dammtor, Metropolis, Passage and the Studio-Kino. The complete programme will be announced on 14 September, advance booking starts on 16 September.
