First films
26. July 2023
Well-known names, new discoveries and excellent films: FILMFEST HAMBURG provides a first insight into this year’s programme. After stops in Cannes, Tribeca and Venice, among others, these ten films celebrate their German premieres in Hamburg.
With The Theory of Everything by Timm Kroeger, a German film has made it into the Venice Competition again after 2020. After its world premiere in Italy, the film noir about a physics congress in the Swiss Alps with unexpected events and mysterious characters will be shown in the Hanseatic city in autumn before it opens in cinemas on 26 October. The main roles are played by Jan Bülow, Hanns Zischler and Olivia Ross.
Wim Wenders returns to Hamburg with his highly acclaimed Cannes double feature: in Anselm, the 2017 Douglas Sirk Award winner paints a portrait of one of the most important visual artists of our time: Anselm Kiefer. Shot in 3D, the film allows its audience to take a cinematic journey through the work of an artist whose art explores human existence and the cyclical nature of history. For more than two years, Wenders followed in Kiefer’s footsteps and impressively shows his life situations and places of creation between Germany and France, Kiefer’s current creative centre.
Perfect Days is about beauty in everyday life. In his film shot in Japan, Wim Wenders tells the story of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner from Tokyo, who pursues his passion for music, books and photography away from his regular everyday life. A series of unexpected encounters gradually reveals more of his past. Lead actor Koji Yakusho was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival.
Following her award-winning film Brother’s Love, FILMFEST HAMBURG is showing The Nature of Love, the latest film by Monia Chokri. In her relationship study in the form of a fast-paced romantic comedy – married philosophy professor meets craftsman – the Canadian director negotiates class differences and exposes the moral contradictions of educated middle-class women and left-wing intellectuals.
A pub as a place of conflict, but also of in-betweenness: In The Old Oak by veteran director Ken Loach, a landlord in the once thriving mining community of Easington tries to save his pub. With the arrival of Syrian refugees, there is trouble in the village, but also new possibilities for living together.
How to Have Sex?: This is the question asked by three British teenage girlfriends who want to experience as much as possible on a club holiday abroad. Molly Manning Walker’s atmospherically dense feature film debut about the pressure of social expectations and female lust was awarded the Grand Prize in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the Cannes Festival.
With The Lesson, British TV director and showrunner Alice Troughton makes her cinema debut. Funded and shot in Hamburg, the thriller tells the story of budding author Liam (Daryl McCormack), who is hired by the family of star author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) and his wife Hélène (July Delpy) as a private tutor for their son. Liam is a great admirer of Sinclair and soon realises that he is becoming more and more entangled in a tightly woven web of family secrets, resentment and retribution.
Is it possible to love other people’s children? In her film Other People’s Children, Rebecca Zlotowski sketches the psychogram of a childless woman who not only lets a new beloved man into her life, but also his four-year-old daughter, for whom she does everything.
After Under the Sand (2015), FILMFEST HAMBURG will show Martin Zandvliet’s film Tove’s Room this year. It is about a day in the life of the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, played by Paprika Steen, who is also very well known in Germany, and whose married life with the publisher Victor Andresen is hell. An invited guest witnesses their broken relationship and gets caught up in an intellectual and emotional slaughter.
Six films by Xavier Dolan have already screened at FILMFEST HAMBURG, most recently Matthias & Maxime in 2019. Now there will be a special and unique screen experience with Dolan’s first drama series
The Night Logan Woke Up in the Voilà! section: All five episodes about the inseparable trio with Mimi, her brother Julian and his friend Logan, whose friendship is shattered by a terrible incident, will be shown back-to-back for the first time at a festival.
The complete line-up will be announced on 12 September 2023. FILMFEST HAMBURG will take place from 28 September to 7 October 2023. Around 110 productions from all over the world will be shown as world, European, German or Hamburg premieres. Festival cinemas are the Abaton, Alabama Kino, CinemaxX Dammtor, Metropolis, Passage and the Studio Kino.
Credits: The Theorie of Everything / Neue Visionen Filmverleih; Perfect Days / Master Mind Ltd., Tove’s Room /Trust Nordisk
The films at a glance:
Anselm
D: Wim Wenders
Germany 2023
Distributor: DCM | Release: 12.10.2023
»Große Freiheit«
How to Have Sex?
D: & S: Molly Manning Walker
United Kingdom, Greece, 2023
Distributor: capelight pictures | Release: 7.12.2023
»Kaleidoskop«
The Lesson
D: Alice Troughton| S: Alex MacKeith
United Kingdom, Germany, 2023
Distributor: Port au Prince Pictures | Release: 26.10.2023
»Kaleidoskop«
The Nature of Love
D: & S: Monia Chokri
Canada, France, 2023
»Voilà!«
The Night Logan Woke Up
TV-Series, 5 x 60 Minutes
D: & S: Xavier Dolan
Canada, 2021
Distributor: Studiocanal
»Voilà!«
The Old Oak
D: Ken Loach | S: Paul Laverty
United Kingdom, France, Belgium, 2023
Distributor: Wild Bunch Germany | Release: 23.11.2023
»Kaleidoskop«
Other People’s Children
D: & S: Rebecca Zlotokowski
France, 2022
»Voilà!«
Perfect Days
D: Wim Wenders
Japan 2023
Distributor: DCM | Release: 21.12.2023
»Asia Express«
The Theory of Everything
D.: Timm Kröger | S: Timm Kröger, Roderick Warich
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, 2023
Distributor: Neue Visionen | Release: 26.10.2023
»Große Freiheit«
Tove’s Room
D: & S: Martin Zandfliet
Denmark, 2023
»Kaleidoskop«
