Bavaria’s Fünf Seen Film Festival began last Thursday and will continue until Sunday. After a wet and wintery weekend, we’re back with summer – and how better to celebrate the sun than at one of Bavaria’s stunning lakes. The second largest Bavarian film festival runs at Starnberg, Seefeld, Herrsching, Wessling und Wörthsee, and showcases 120 films, for just 8 € a pop.
Today, in Starnberg, you can check out the Brazilian drama Xingu, directed by Cao Hamburger. The film focuses on three Brazilian brothers, who encounter indigenous people in the vast Amazon region. Over many years, the brothers help to create a sustainable homeland for the indigenous tribes. Some reviews have criticised the scale of the task that Hamburger took on, and mention that the film is just too short to cover the history, but overall it received very positive press at the 2011 Amazonas Film Festival.
If you’re out and about in Starnberg tomorrow, you can also catch the film at 1pm on the Kino Breitwand in Starnberg.
Last week I watched Der Knochenmann in the open-air Viehhof Kino. The Austrian movie was gruesome and brutal, but surprisingly humorous. Isn’t Josef Hader wonderful? Another spine-chilling Austrian movie is showing in Seefeld tomorrow at 7.30pm – Stillleben. The film centres on a man who pays prostitutes to play the role of his daughter. When his secret comes out, his whole family begins to fall apart. The children struggle to deal with their own memories, while the father has to deal with shame and destructive feelings of guilt. A frightening but fascinating movie.
My tip for Friday is Fellini’s Amarcord at the Gasthof Schuster Hochstadt (also showing in other locations throughout the week) at 8.30pm. The baroque director, greatly influenced by Charlie Chaplin is perhaps most famous for the 1960 movie La Dolce Vita, but the 1974 film Amarcord also won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. And boy, what an influence Fellini has had on the world – La Dolce Vita is partly responsible for the introduction of the word paparazzi into English; directors such as Woody Allen and David Lynch have cited Fellini as an influence and Stanley Kubrick adored the Italian director.
Amarcord depicts a year in the life of Rimini in the 1930s. The movie is warm, comic and nostalgic, and his ability to delicately observe makes the film a true classic.
There are so many other interesting international films running until Sunday, it’s impossible to pick a favourite. The Swiss film Mangrove focuses on a French woman who travels to Mexico to make peace with the past; the 1994 Turkmenistani movie Karakum focuses on a boy who travels to visit his father and along the way experiences a multitude of adventures; and perhaps my personal favourite – the Kenn Scott comedy Starbuck features a man who, as a sperm donor discovers he’s fathered well over five hundred children – watch the original before Spielberg remakes it.
The final day of the film festival is Sunday, when the winners will be announced in Starnberg from 8pm onwards. If award ceremonies don’t rock your boat, there are plenty of other films to catch at one of the lakes.
For the full program, click here.
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