Munich’s annual international film festival is larger than ever. This year, the festival will host 45 premieres, visiting stars include Sofia Coppola, Bill Nighy and Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, and will show a total of 180 movies from 60 countries.
The festival will open with Claire Denis’ Un Beau Soleil Intérieur (Let the Sunshine In), a film about a single woman (Juliette Binoche) living alone in Paris. The Guardian has described it as an “unexpectedly delightful” movie from the director of 35 Shots of Rum, and it was widely praised at Cannes, where the movie opened the Directors’ Fortnight.
Coppola is in Munich showing her new film The Beguiled, for which she won a Palme D’Or at Cannes this year (she’s only the second woman to win the Best Director award at the festival). The Beguiled stars Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning, and takes place in a girls’ boarding school during the American Civil War.
I’m particularly looking forward to Buster’s Mal Heart, starring Rami Malek, which is showing this coming Friday and Saturday at Münchner Freiheit (the director Sarah Adina Smith will be present for a Q&A after the screening). I think Malek’s performance in Mr. Robot is incredible, and it sounds weirdly wonderful.
Bryan Cranston will be awarded the CineMerit Award at the Gasteig this coming Friday, honouring his contribution to film over the past two decades. His current film Wakefield, based on E. L. Doctorow’s short story of a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis (read it in The New Yorker), is showing four times over the course of the festival.
Bill Nighy’s WWII movie Their Finest (also starring Gemma Arteton) is rounding things off at the FILMFEST, and the actor will be discussing the movie before its screening on July 1st. Unsurprisingly, tickets have already sold-out.
Running parallel to the FILMFEST is the Kinderfilmfest, which is showing some brilliant films this year – including Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.
The full program is available as a not-very-user-friendly PDF online – it’s easier to flick through the magazine (in German only) and pick out your movies.
Tickets can be ordered online and picked up from the Gasteig (or from Friday onwards, at a variety of venues across the city).
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