2017 Berlin & Beyond Film Festival in Honolulu
Post date: Mar 20, 2017 9:32:36 PM
4th Berlin & Beyond Honolulu
Join us for two full days and nights at the Honolulu Museum of Art Doris Duke Theatre - April 8-9, 2017 for a vivid selection of films, crossing various cultures, experiences, and histories from the main San Francisco lineup of America's leading festival of the contemporary cinematic movements of German-speaking countries. All eight films will make their Hawaii Premieres at this special series, including all three Audience Award Winners from the San Francisco program: "Center of My World" (Narrative Premiere), "Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe" (Narrative Gala), and "Silicon Valley Revolution" (Documentary).
Presented by the Goethe-Institut San Francisco. In collaboration with the Honorary Consuls of the Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland in Honolulu under the auspices of their respective Consulates General in San Francisco. Sponsored by BMW of Honolulu. With additional support from the Honorary Consul of Austria in Honolulu and Community Partner Honolulu Museum of Art.
Online Box Office:
FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
Saturday, April 8, 2017
11:00 AM - At Eye Level
1:00 PM - Eva Hesse
3:00 PM - Fukushima, mon Amour
5:30 PM - Opening Night Reception at BMW of Honolulu
7:30 PM - Opening Night Film: Scrappin'
Sunday, April 9, 2017
11:00 AM - Heidi
1:00 PM - Silicon Valley Revolution
3:30 PM - Center of My World
6:45 PM - Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
TICKETS
Single Ticket Per Regular Film (afternoon and evening screenings):
$12.00 general
$10.00 senior
$9.00 student
At Eye Level
Opening Night Package (Reception + Scrappin' film)
$25.00 (no discounts)
Single Ticket Per Family Matinée Film (morning screenings):
$8.00 (no discount
Festival Pass (All Films + Opening Night Reception)
$100 general
$90.00 senior
$80.00 student
Online Box Office:
www.brownpapertickets.com/profile/98451
Eva Hesse
Film: At Eye Level (Auf Augenhöhe)
Showtimes: Saturday, April 8 at 11:00 AM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906283
Directed by Evi Goldbrunner, Joachim Dollhopf. Starring Luis Vorbach, Jordan Prentice, Ella Frey, Marco Licht, Anica Dobra . Germany. 2016. 106 min. German with English subtitles.
Winner of the 2016-2017 Berlin & Beyond Film Festival Youth 4 German Cinema Award, presided by a special jury of young people from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Michael, an 11 year old orphan, lives in a children's home and has to fight each day to win the respect of the other children. One day, he finds out who his real father is and writes him a letter. His father, Tom, happens to be a person of short stature, who is even shorter than Michael. He wants to accept the challenge of fatherhood, even though he knew nothing about Michael until now. For Michael, Tom’s handicap is a disaster, as he feels that it is opposite of the manliness and strength he envisioned his father to have. When the other children finds out, Michael’s life becomes a disaster and he runs away from the children's home. With no other place to go, he moves in with Tom. Tom is new to fatherhood but tries his best, while Michael tries to hide his embarrassment from his classmates. This forces Tom to confront his handicap head on. As time passes, they discover that they have more in common than other sons and fathers, and form an unlikely bond.
Fukushima, mon Amour
Film: Fukushima, mon Amour (Grüße aus Fukushima)
Showtimes: Saturday, April 8 at 3:00 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906292
Directed by Doris Dörrie. Starring Rosalie Thomass, Kaori Momoi, Moshe Cohen, Nami Kamata. Germany (Filmed in Japan). 2016. 106 min. English, German and Japanese with English subtitles.
Winner of three awards, including the Audience Award Runner-up at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival in Germany. Young German woman Marie escapes to Fukushima to change her life. Working with the organization Clowns4Help, she hopes to bring joy to 2011 disaster survivors, some still living in emergency shelters. Marie soon realizes that she is absolutely unsuited to the task of making tragedy less wearisome. Instead of running away, Marie decides to stay with cantankerous old Satomi, the last geisha of Fukushima, who of her own accord has decided to retreat back to her ruined house in the formerly radioactive Exclusion Zone. Two women who couldn't be more different, but who – each in her own way – are trapped in the past and must learn to liberate themselves from guilt and the burden of memory. A universal and poetic tale about life and letting go from acclaimed writer-director Doris Dörrie (Cherry Blossoms - Berlin & Beyond Opening Night 2009, Enlightenment Guaranteed, Men). For the first time, one of her feature films has been shot entirely in Japan and in breathtaking black and white.
Heidi
Film: Heidi
Showtimes: Sunday, April 9 at 11:00 AM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906296
Directed by Alain Gsponer. Starring Anuk Steffen, Bruno Ganz, Quirin Agrippi, Isabelle Ottmann, Anna Schinz, Katharina Schüttler. Switzerland, Germany. 2015. 105 min. German and Swiss German with English subtitles.
The most successful Swiss film in Swiss box office history and winner of the 2016 German Film Award for Best Children's Film: Orphan girl Heidi spends the happiest days of her childhood together with her eccentric grandfather, cut off from the outside world in a simple cabin in the Swiss mountains. Together with her friend Peter, she tends to grandfather's goats and enjoys freedom in the mountains to the fullest. But these carefree times come to an abrupt end when Heidi is taken to Frankfurt by her Aunt Dete. The idea is for her to stay with the family of the wealthy Mr. Sesemann and be a playmate for his wheelchair-bound daughter Klara, while also learning to read and write under the supervision of the strict nanny, Fräulein Rottenmeier. Although the two girls soon become friends and Klara's grandmother awakes a passion for her books in Heidi, her longing for her beloved mountains and her grandfather grows ever stronger.
Center of My World
Film: Center of My World (Die Mitte der Welt)
Showtimes: Sunday, April 9 at 3:30 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906301
Directed by Jakob M. Erwa. Starring Louis Hofmann, Jannik Schümann, Sabine Timoteo, Ada Philine Stappenbeck. Germany, Austria. 2016. 115 min. German with English subtitles.
Best Feature Film (ex-aequo) winner at the 2016 Florence Queer Festival in Italy and In Competition at the 2016 Moscow International Film Festival in Russia. After a summer away at camp, Phil returns home to find that his mother and twin sister are not speaking to each another. Not willing to confront his family during the last days of the summer holidays, Phil escapes to hang out with his best friend, Kat, eating ice cream and playing dress-up. As the school year begins, a new student arrives – the handsome and mysterious Nicholas. Smitten, Phil watches his crush as he runs around the track after school, and is thrilled when Nicholas returns his feelings. However, when first love’s volatility comes to light, Phil realizes he must deal with the problems of his past, in order to deal with the issues of his present.
Film: Eva Hesse
Showtimes: Saturday, April 8 at 1:00 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906289
Directed by Marcie Begleiter. USA, Germany. 2016. 108 min. English.
Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is one of America’s foremost postwar artists. Her pioneering sculptures, using latex, fiberglass, and plastics, helped establish the post-minimalist movement. Dying of a brain tumor at age 34, she had a mere decade-long career that, despite its brevity, is dense with complex, intriguing works that defy easy categorization. Eva Hesse, the first feature-length appreciation of her life and work, makes superb use of the artist’s voluminous journals, her correspondence with close friend and mentor Sol LeWitt, and contemporary as well as archival interviews with fellow artists (among them, Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Dan Graham) who recall her passionate, ambitious, tenacious personality. Art critic Arthur Danto has written that her work is: “full of life, of eros, even of comedy… Each piece vibrates with originality and mischief.” The documentary captures these qualities, but also the psychic struggles of an artist who, in the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, was one of the few women to make work that was taken seriously in a field dominated by male pop artists and minimalists. −Karen Cooper, Film Forum
Scrappin'
Film: Scrappin' (Schrotten!)
Showtimes: Saturday, April 8 at 7:30 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906276
Directed by Max Zähle. Starring Lucas Gregorowicz, Frederick Lau, Anna Bederke, Lars Rudolph, Heiko Pinkowski, Jan-Gregor Kremp. Germany. 2016. 96 min. German with English subtitles.
Following his Oscar®-nominated short film Raju, Max Zähle dedicates his feature film debut to a bizarre and largely unknown culture marked by long-standing tradition: scrap dealers. Scrappin’ sheds light on this sometimes weird but always loveable milieu and tells the story of a family that needs to overcome their differences in order to keep the family business going. Mirko Talhammer (Lucas Gregorowicz) is beside himself when two strangers show up at his posh insurance office to remind him where he really comes from: a provincial scrapyard, where careers are not what counts and other things are more important: scrapping things, the family, and every once in a while, a good old fist fight. Mirko thought he had left all that behind, but his father messed things up big time before he died and left his son the run-down scrapyard – along with his brother Letscho (Frederick Lau, Victoria, The Wave). Letscho is still ticked off that Mirko deserted the clan. Soon the brothers realize that the Talhammers could only have a future if they can pull themselves together and fulfill their father’s last wish: to rob a train like real professionals. The coup itself is already a suicide mission, but then Kercher, the Talhammer’s biggest nemesis, gets wind of things…
Silicon Valley Revolution
Film: Silicon Valley Revolution
Showtimes: Sunday, April 9 at 1:00 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906299
Directed by Jan Tenhaven. Germany. 2017. 90 min. English and German with English subtitles.
This documentary tells the forgotten stories of some of the most influential personal computer pioneers in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1960s, big mainframe computers owned by large corporations and the government were seen as tools of control. The Hippie movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests served as a hotbed for a revolutionary idea: creating an affordable home computer to be used by ordinary people – as a counterbalance to Big Brother. Well, the rest is history, but what has happened to the early ideals and the initial ethos of free sharing? As one of the visionaries puts it: “It’s true that what I helped to create is today’s establishment. That’s what I was trying to get rid of: the establishment.
Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
Film: Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (Vor der Morgenröte)
Showtimes: Sunday, April 9 at 6:45 PM
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2906303
Directed by Maria Schrader. Starring Josef Hader, Barbara Sukowa, Aenne Schwarz, Matthias Brandt. Germany, Austria, France. 2016. 106 min. German, English, Portuguese, French, Spanish with English subtitles.
Austria’s Official Entry to the 2017 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Maria Schrader’s drama Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe episodically tells the story of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his life in exile between 1936-42. Having been driven into emigration at the peak of his worldwide fame, Stefan Zweig falls into despair at the sight of Europe’s downfall, which he had anticipated early on. It’s the story of a refugee, a tale of losing one’s homeland, and of the search for a new one. Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, New York, Petrópolis are four stations of an expatriate unable to find peace. Despite the generous welcome and the overwhelming opulence of tropical vegetation he encounters, nothing can replace his homeland. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe is a visually stunning historic picture about a great artist and, at the same time, a film about a time in which Europe was coming apart. Premiered at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival in the Piazza Grande section.