Germany's second-largest film festival is exploding with great movies. DW looks at 10 noteworthy films showing at the 2018 festival, including a "Das Boot" TV series for fall that's already causing a sensation.
Munich in the summer time: The festival for film lovers featured many new German productions this year. Alongside gems from the international art film scene were also retrospectives and series highlights.
Image: Filmfest München 2017/B. Schmidt
Poetry from Italy: An international festival highlight
Munich takes care in its selection to show the best of the best at the film festival, including current international film productions not yet seen in German cinemas. This year, that included "Happy as Lazzaro" by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, a film recently celebrated in Cannes and for some observers, the most beautiful film of the competition. It was awarded a Palme for best screenplay.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
Breaking free from the family: Discoveries from around the globe
A bit smaller, but just as worth your time were the films shown in the festival's Spotlight series, which features movies by directors of the future. Lively, the films often tell the stories of outsiders. Like the Spanish film "Carmen y Lola," about a young woman from a Roma clan trying to break out of a predetermined path.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
Independent cinema with an international view
"Independent cinema is committed to its themes, with its protagonists, locations, artistic vision and experimental approach — more so than with the red carpet or social media resonance," the festival's programmers wrote. One good example of this is the Austrian documentary about an electronic waste heap in Ghana called, "Welcome to Sodom: your smartphone is already here."
Image: Filmfest München 2018
Politics and timely events at the center of new German cinema
What are Germany's film directors doing, which themes do they address, how do they deal with the medium formally? Answers can be found in the 16 premieres that are part of the New German Cinema series. "Wackersdorf" by Oliver Haffner picks up on recent West German history by taking up the 1980s civil resistance against a planned reprocessing plant in Upper Palatinate for an exciting feature film.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
Lady in Red: New German television
Sometimes the small screen can have the same impact as cinema. That's the case with a few works that premiered in Munich and will soon be on German television. One of the highlights: Dominik Graf's "Hanne," about a woman (Iris Berben) who gets the message that she may have leukemia on a Friday. The results of her tests won't come through until Monday. How would you spend the weekend?
Image: Filmfest München 2018
German TV series are more than just Perfume
Every festival that knows what it's doing is also screening TV series on a big screen. In Munich, that included a premiere of the "Perfume" series as well as the multi-part "Servus Baby." The tale in four episodes follows a woman in her early 30s who deals with being suddenly single in chic, expensive Munich. What does that mean for her life's dreams: finding love, having children, a career?
Image: Filmfest München 2018
A retrospective: Lucrecia Martel's Argentina
Women's worlds are also the focus of the films of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. This year's festival retrospective is dedicated to the director, whose feature film debut in 2001, "The Swamp" (above picture) looks at the moral morass of Argentine family structures. The films of the director are magical and realistic at the same time: recommended works!
Image: Filmfest München 2018
Films on film
The Munich festival traditionally looks behind the scenes of the business: The series Lights! Camera! Action! showcases films about filmmaking. This year, works about Ingmar Bergman, Milos Forman and Orson Welles are part of the program. "The Eyes of Orson Welles" focuses on a little-known side of the directorial titan, using unpublished material from the film's designer.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
A revealing documentary on Ingmar Bergman
And for anyone who thought that everything had already been said about the Swedish director of the century, the documentary "Bergman: A Year in a Life" proved there's still more to explore. It addresses Bergman's long-lasting sympathy for the Nazis and covers his very individual perspective on the past and upbringing.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
A knockout under the heavens
One special part of the festival is the open air series, offering audiences the chance to see many film classics. In 2018, eight boxing films were shown under the motto, "Faust aufs Auge" — literally, "a fist in the eye," an expression referring to something that fits like a glove. Classics of the genre like Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" brought the festival to a high point.
Image: Filmfest München 2018
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For most film festival attendees, the event is a celebration of cinema. You can watch films that haven't yet landed in conventional movie theaters, by directors who might not even make it to the box office. Rarely is this a sign of film quality; if more than half of all movie screens in the average German city show three or four American blockbusters, there is simply not enough room left for films from Italy or China, Argentina or Australia. Film festivals have filled these gaps for years.
Featuring the work of Lucrecia Martel in Munich
Munich is one of the film festivals to fill this vacuum, as it relies on films from countries whose cinematic works are otherwise hard to find in everyday program life. An example of this is the Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel, to whom this year's retrospective in Munich is dedicated. Martel, one of the most important filmmakers in South America, was present in Munich to personally present her work.
A scene from Lucrecia Martel's movie 'Zama'Image: Filmfest München 2018
Lucrecia Martel's films open up rare sensory impressions of life in Argentina: mysterious and surreal, but also very close to everyday life and the pulse of society.
Film festivals are also a means for presenting film projects that are still in the works. The creators of the new large-scale project Das Boot ("the boat"), which has already wracked up over € 26 million ($30 million) in costs, used the Munich Festival to report on the broadcast of the series, which is scheduled for autumn.
A new TV series based on a familiar film
Subscribers to the broadcaster Sky will be treated to the eight-part series in autumn. With Das Boot, Sky is attempting to gain a foothold in the local market, just as they tried to do with the hit German TV series Babylon Berlin. Producers in Munich said that the series is at an advantage thanks to branding that has already taken place: the Oscar-winning film of the same name (and the TV version) by Wolfgang Petersen from 1981 should be known to most viewers.
Submarines and soldiers are once again at the center of 'Das Boot'Image: picture-alliance/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Sky/N.M.Konietzny
But don't count on it to be a sequel or remake of the old material, director Andreas Prochaska said in Munich. Simply "inspired" by the Petersen movie, the story told in the new film begins nine months after the cinematic events of the Petersen movie, in 1942. And it isn't set only inside the submarine.
"With a lot of sweaty men below deck," as the series' producer put it, the 1981 film was aimed too directly at male audiences. So the latest project got an upgrade, with two parallel narratives. One takes place on land with a female protagonist played by German-Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, who was on hand in Munich to talk about the series.
It's not only the story and actors that are new; the TV series also has a new director, screenplay and production. But one element bridged the old and new Boot — the music. Klaus Doldinger, the composer of the music for the original Das Boot film, was on hand in Munich to wish the new production team the best of luck.
