Independent production and distribution company Main Street Films (which recently had a domestic success with the male stripper doc "La Bare") will theatrically release Christian Schwochow’s acclaimed spy drama "West" across the U.S. on November 7. Set during the Berlin Wall-era, the film’s release date will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9. "West" was also one of the films shortlisted to be Germany’s candidate for the Foreign Language Academy Award.
The film was also part of the Kino! Fetival of German Films, which we covered back in June. Read More Here
"'West' is a strong and emotional film that accurately portrays the fear and tension that existed between the East and the West during the Berlin Wall-era and is an important reminder of Germany’s recent history,” said Craig Chang, Chairman of Main Street Films.
“This is a very personal film for me,” said Christian Schwochow, director. “My family left in 1989 just after the wall came down, but it was still a time of great uncertainty. All we had was hope that life would be better and that’s a great motivator. Releasing "West" during the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is very special, especially after having the opportunity to collaborate with my mother, who wrote the screenplay.”
Winning the Fipresci prize at the 2013 Montreal Film Festival and the Best Actress award for Jôrdis Triebel at the 2014 German Film Awards, West is based on Julia Franck’s autobiographical novel Camp Fire and adapted by the director’s mother and regular screenwriting partner, Heide Schwochow.
Set during the late 1970s, three years after Nelly Senff’s boyfriend Wassilij’s apparent death, she decides to escape from behind the Berlin Wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij’s mysterious disappearance. Fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.
"West" stars Jördis Triebel, Alexander Scheer, Tristan Göbel, and Jacky Ido (who is currently the lead actor in Luc Besson's TV series Taxi Brooklyn), and is produced by ö Filmproduktion’s Katrin Schlösser, zero one film’s Thomas Kufus, and Terz Filmproduktion’s Christoph Friedel. Helge Sasse of Senator Film Produktion, Barbara Buhl of Wdr, Stefanie Groß of Swr, Cooky Ziesche of rbb, and Georg Steinert of Arte are co-producers.
Take a look at this exclusive trailer courtesy of Main Street Films
About Main Street Films
Established in 2007, Main Street Films is an independent film entertainment company and has emerged as one of the industry's most exciting production, acquisition, and distribution driven ensembles. On the distribution side, Main Street Films focuses on creating and distributing high quality films across multiple genres for diverse audiences within the entertainment space. Opening later this year is the critically acclaimed The Turning starring Oscar® winner Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, based on Tim Winton’s award-winning collection of short stories.
The film was also part of the Kino! Fetival of German Films, which we covered back in June. Read More Here
"'West' is a strong and emotional film that accurately portrays the fear and tension that existed between the East and the West during the Berlin Wall-era and is an important reminder of Germany’s recent history,” said Craig Chang, Chairman of Main Street Films.
“This is a very personal film for me,” said Christian Schwochow, director. “My family left in 1989 just after the wall came down, but it was still a time of great uncertainty. All we had was hope that life would be better and that’s a great motivator. Releasing "West" during the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is very special, especially after having the opportunity to collaborate with my mother, who wrote the screenplay.”
Winning the Fipresci prize at the 2013 Montreal Film Festival and the Best Actress award for Jôrdis Triebel at the 2014 German Film Awards, West is based on Julia Franck’s autobiographical novel Camp Fire and adapted by the director’s mother and regular screenwriting partner, Heide Schwochow.
Set during the late 1970s, three years after Nelly Senff’s boyfriend Wassilij’s apparent death, she decides to escape from behind the Berlin Wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij’s mysterious disappearance. Fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.
"West" stars Jördis Triebel, Alexander Scheer, Tristan Göbel, and Jacky Ido (who is currently the lead actor in Luc Besson's TV series Taxi Brooklyn), and is produced by ö Filmproduktion’s Katrin Schlösser, zero one film’s Thomas Kufus, and Terz Filmproduktion’s Christoph Friedel. Helge Sasse of Senator Film Produktion, Barbara Buhl of Wdr, Stefanie Groß of Swr, Cooky Ziesche of rbb, and Georg Steinert of Arte are co-producers.
Take a look at this exclusive trailer courtesy of Main Street Films
About Main Street Films
Established in 2007, Main Street Films is an independent film entertainment company and has emerged as one of the industry's most exciting production, acquisition, and distribution driven ensembles. On the distribution side, Main Street Films focuses on creating and distributing high quality films across multiple genres for diverse audiences within the entertainment space. Opening later this year is the critically acclaimed The Turning starring Oscar® winner Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, based on Tim Winton’s award-winning collection of short stories.
- 9/19/2014
- by Carlos Aguilar
- Sydney's Buzz
BERLIN -- The marketing concept is a sound one: Sixty years after the end of World War II, Germans want to forget the shame and guilt of the Third Reich and be able to laugh about Hitler.
That's the zeitgeist that almost certainly will make "My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" (Mein Fuehrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit ueber Adolf Hitler) a hit in Germany, where it opens Thursday, and it also provides a slogan ("Germany's first comedy about Hitler!") that will generate respectable ticket sales in art house theaters internationally.
The only problem is that "Mein Fuehrer" is not actually funny.
The film is being marketed as a comedy and is being compared to other great Third Reich comedies, from Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful". But it is not so much a comedy as a bland, politically correct fantasy about a Jew who teaches Hitler how to be Hitler.
As played by stand-up comedian Helge Schneider, Hitler is a lovable sad sack who has lost his will to triumph in the final months of the war at a time when the German people need him most. Goebbels has a great idea: We'll take a Jewish actor named Adolf Gruenbaum out of a concentration camp and get him to coach Hitler to make a single last-ditch effort inspire the Germans to support the war at an upcoming rally.
What follows is a chamber play between the two, in which Gruenbaum (played with quiet precision by Ulrich Muehe, fresh off his success in "The Lives of Others") devotes most of his time to therapy, getting Hitler to crawl around on hands and knees, barking, and to talk about his relationship with his father.
There are flashes of humor: Hitler in a track suit, Hitler playing with a toy battleship in a bubble bath or Hitler being humped by his dog Blondi. But director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes. There are even flashes of controversy, as when the dictator tauntingly asks Gruenbaum why the Jews didn't fight back. (This question is mirrored in Gruenbaum's situation: Although the opportunity is repeatedly handed to him on a silver platter, Gruenbaum never has the nerve to kill Hitler.) But the theme is neither developed enough to inspire controversy nor funny enough to entertain.
Levy, a Swiss-born Jewish auteur who tackled German-Jewish issues in his recent hit "Go for Zucker!" seems less interested in comedy than he is in getting across a moral: We learn that Hitler had a small penis and was compensating for an unhappy childhood. That might be true, but we've heard it before, and from real historians. In the meantime, it has lost its allure as history or as potential for humor.
The final joke in the movie is a pun: When Hitler loses his voice, Gruenbaum has to bark the speech into a microphone while the Fuehrer lip-syncs it. Gruenbaum takes the opportunity to instruct the German nation to "Heal yourselves" (instead of "Heil Hitler", since heil also means "heal" in German). It's an important message but a weak pun.
The mood is light throughout, production values are excellent, and the film works as entertainment directed at an older set of viewers who are opposed to excitable fare. (Three state-funded public broadcasters, whose core audiences are largely older than 50, were involved in the production.) But to duplicate the success of "Life Is Beautiful", Levy would have done better to concentrate on the characters and comedy and leave the preaching to others.
MY FUEHRER -- THE REALLY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER
X Filme Creative Pool/Y Filme Directors Pool
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Dani Levy
Producer: Marcos Kantis
Executive producers: Stefan Arndt, Barbara Buhl, Andreas Schreitmueller, Bettina Reitz
Director of photography: Carl-F Koschnick
Art director: Christian Eisele
Music: Niki Reiser
Costume designer: Nicole Fischnaller
Editor: Peter R. Adam
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Helge Schneider
Prof. Adolf Gruenbaum: Ulrich Muehe
Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth
Elsa Gruenbaum: Adriana Altaras
Albert Speer: Stefan Kurt
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen
Rattenhuber: Lambert Hamel
Martin Bormann: Udo Kroschwald
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
That's the zeitgeist that almost certainly will make "My Fuehrer -- the Really Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler" (Mein Fuehrer -- Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit ueber Adolf Hitler) a hit in Germany, where it opens Thursday, and it also provides a slogan ("Germany's first comedy about Hitler!") that will generate respectable ticket sales in art house theaters internationally.
The only problem is that "Mein Fuehrer" is not actually funny.
The film is being marketed as a comedy and is being compared to other great Third Reich comedies, from Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful". But it is not so much a comedy as a bland, politically correct fantasy about a Jew who teaches Hitler how to be Hitler.
As played by stand-up comedian Helge Schneider, Hitler is a lovable sad sack who has lost his will to triumph in the final months of the war at a time when the German people need him most. Goebbels has a great idea: We'll take a Jewish actor named Adolf Gruenbaum out of a concentration camp and get him to coach Hitler to make a single last-ditch effort inspire the Germans to support the war at an upcoming rally.
What follows is a chamber play between the two, in which Gruenbaum (played with quiet precision by Ulrich Muehe, fresh off his success in "The Lives of Others") devotes most of his time to therapy, getting Hitler to crawl around on hands and knees, barking, and to talk about his relationship with his father.
There are flashes of humor: Hitler in a track suit, Hitler playing with a toy battleship in a bubble bath or Hitler being humped by his dog Blondi. But director-screenwriter Dani Levy seems to avoid more opportunities for jokes than he takes. There are even flashes of controversy, as when the dictator tauntingly asks Gruenbaum why the Jews didn't fight back. (This question is mirrored in Gruenbaum's situation: Although the opportunity is repeatedly handed to him on a silver platter, Gruenbaum never has the nerve to kill Hitler.) But the theme is neither developed enough to inspire controversy nor funny enough to entertain.
Levy, a Swiss-born Jewish auteur who tackled German-Jewish issues in his recent hit "Go for Zucker!" seems less interested in comedy than he is in getting across a moral: We learn that Hitler had a small penis and was compensating for an unhappy childhood. That might be true, but we've heard it before, and from real historians. In the meantime, it has lost its allure as history or as potential for humor.
The final joke in the movie is a pun: When Hitler loses his voice, Gruenbaum has to bark the speech into a microphone while the Fuehrer lip-syncs it. Gruenbaum takes the opportunity to instruct the German nation to "Heal yourselves" (instead of "Heil Hitler", since heil also means "heal" in German). It's an important message but a weak pun.
The mood is light throughout, production values are excellent, and the film works as entertainment directed at an older set of viewers who are opposed to excitable fare. (Three state-funded public broadcasters, whose core audiences are largely older than 50, were involved in the production.) But to duplicate the success of "Life Is Beautiful", Levy would have done better to concentrate on the characters and comedy and leave the preaching to others.
MY FUEHRER -- THE REALLY TRUEST TRUTH ABOUT ADOLF HITLER
X Filme Creative Pool/Y Filme Directors Pool
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Dani Levy
Producer: Marcos Kantis
Executive producers: Stefan Arndt, Barbara Buhl, Andreas Schreitmueller, Bettina Reitz
Director of photography: Carl-F Koschnick
Art director: Christian Eisele
Music: Niki Reiser
Costume designer: Nicole Fischnaller
Editor: Peter R. Adam
Cast:
Adolf Hitler: Helge Schneider
Prof. Adolf Gruenbaum: Ulrich Muehe
Dr. Joseph Goebbels: Sylvester Groth
Elsa Gruenbaum: Adriana Altaras
Albert Speer: Stefan Kurt
Heinrich Himmler: Ulrich Noethen
Rattenhuber: Lambert Hamel
Martin Bormann: Udo Kroschwald
Running time -- 90 minutes
No MPAA rating...
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