tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

After a brief respite, we're back with Part 3 of  tMF's Top 50 Essential Foreign Films. This time the spotlight is on German cinema.

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As in Part 1 - French cinema and Part 2 - Movies from the UK, the scope remains the same:

Content-wise, the 50 movies feature stories about war and peace, love and romance, family affairs, coming-of-age tales, cultural and religious diversity, social issues (including prostitution and abortion) and personal - celebrating life or facing death with dignity. Coverage-wise, tMF list down many of the best foreign films from 2000 until last year from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and about 15 other countries in Europe, North and Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
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1. Das Experiment - 2001 - Featuring the amazing performance of Moritz Bleibtreu and Christian Berkel, from the direction of Oliver Hirschbiegel.

About the Movie: Inspired by a famous 1971 psychological experiment, Oliver Hirschbiegel's German-language movie The Experiment finds a group of 20 volunteers randomly divided into 12 prisoners and eight guards and asked to play out their roles for a fortnight while scientists study their reactions. A conflict arises between undercover reporter Fahd (Moritz Bleibtreu), a con with a hidden agenda, and the apparently mild-mannered Berus (Justus von Dohnanyi), a guard with a megalomaniac streak. The film begins as a psychological drama as ordinary people settle into the game, with joking displays of resistance by the "prisoners" greeted with increasing brutality from the "guards," but detours into suspense and horror as Fahd, who needs the experiment to get out of hand in order to make his story more saleable, deliberately ratchets up the tension between the factions only to see the situation spiral nightmarishly out of control as various test subjects in both camps edge closer to snapping. With a terrific display of ensemble acting and unforced use of the popular claustrophobic semi-documentary look, Hirschbiegel's movie takes its time to get underway, with apparently irrelevant cutaways to Fahd's outside girlfriend (Maren Eggert), but works up to a powerful second half that delivers a sustained symphony of psychological and physical anguish.

Warning: Contains some very disturbing scenes!

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Related buzz: Moritz Bleibtreu won best Actor at the European Films Award and at the Seattle International Film Fest.
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2. Good bye, Lenin! - 2003 - Featuring Daniel Bruhl in his most important role, rom acclaimed filmmaker Wolfgang Becker.

About the Movie: Contemporary comedies rarely stretch themselves beyond a bickering romantic couple or a bickering couple and a bucket of bodily fluids, which makes the ambition and intelligence of Good bye, Lenin! not simply entertaining but downright refreshing. The movie starts in East Germany before the fall of communism; our hero, Alex (Daniel Bruhl), describes how his mother (Katrin Sass), a true believer in the communist cause, has a heart attack when she sees him being clubbed by police at a protest. She falls into a coma for eight months--during which the Berlin Wall comes down. When she awakens, her fragile health must avoid any shocks, so Alex creates an illusive reality around his bedridden mother to convince her that communism is still alive. Good bye, Lenin! delicately balances wry satire with its rich investment in the lives of Alex, his mother, and other characters around them. Funny, moving, and highly recommended.

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Featured Review: Says Ruthe Stein at the SF Chronicles: The cockamamie way foreign language films are chosen for Oscar consideration is evident in the fact that "Good Bye, Lenin!'' wasn't even nominated. I don't claim to have seen every entry from around the world, but it's hard to imagine five better than this deliciously offbeat comedy, as wildly inventive as anything Billy Wilder ever conceived.

"Good Bye, Lenin!'' is both a touching story of a son's devotion to his mother and a wry commentary on how not all East Germans were thrilled by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Set in 1989, just as capitalism trumps communism, the movie comes down equally hard on both systems. Communism may have been boring and turned believers into Stepford wives, but at least you weren't bombarded with Coca-Cola signs and otherwise prodded to consume. It's a measure of the film's evenhandedness that it's been a huge hit all over Germany.

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3. Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters) - 2007 - Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

About the Movie: The Counterfeiters is the true story of the largest counterfeiting operation in history, set up by the Nazis in 1936. Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch is the king of counterfeiters. He lives a mischievous life of cards, booze, and women in Berlin during the Nazi-era. Suddenly his luck runs dry when arrested by Superintendent Friedrich Herzog. Immediately thrown into the Mauthausen concentration camp, Salomon exhibits exceptional skills there and is soon transferred to the upgraded camp of Sachsenhausen. Upon his arrival, he once again comes face to face with Herzog, who is there on a secret mission. Hand-picked for his unique skill, Salomon and a group of professionals are forced to produce fake foreign currency under the program Operation Bernhard. The team, which also includes detainee Adolf Burger, is given luxury barracks for their assistance. But while Salomon attempts to weaken the economy of Germany's allied opponents, Adolf refuses to use his skills for Nazi profit and would like to do something to stop Operation Bernhard's aid to the war effort. Faced with a moral dilemma, Salomon must decide whether his actions, which could prolong the war and risk the lives of fellow prisoners, are ultimately the right ones.

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4. The DownFall (Der Untergang) - 2004 - Nominated for Oscar, from director Oliver Hirschbiegel, featuring an all-star cast including Bruno Ganz as Hitler and Alexandra Maria Lara.

About the Movie: In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his Generals and advisers to fight to the last man. "Downfall" explores these final days of the Reich, where senior German leaders (such as Himmler and Goring) began defecting from their beloved Fuhrer, in an effort to save their own lives, while still others (Joseph Goebbels) pledge to die with Hitler. Hitler, himself, degenerates into a paranoid shell of a man, full of optimism one moment and suicidal depression the next. When the end finally does comes, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender.

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5. The Edukators - 2004 - One of the best films from Austrian filmmaker Hans Weingartner.

About the Movie: Jan (Daniel Brühl) and Peter are the best friends behind the radical and mysterious group The Edukators, united by their passion to change the world, in "The funniest, most original movie I’ve seen all year." (David Edwards, The Daily Mirror). When the rich go on vacation, The Edukators break into their homes. They don’t steal, but simply rearrange everything, leaving the message "Your days of plenty are numbered." When Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch, winner, Best Young Actress, 2005 Bavarian Film Awards) moves in, she joins them in their subversive activities. But when a rich businessman catches them in the act, they rashly decide to kidnap him. Faced with the values of the generation in power, they will see what kind of revolutionaries they are, if their friendship can survive, and discover if they truly work in the interest of the greater good, or just in their own self-interest. Passions rage and loyalties shatter in director Hans Weingartner’s exciting film that’s "Fresh, biting, gripping, tender, and tense."

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6. Sommersturm - 2004 - From Marco Kreuzpaintner, featuring Kostja Ullmann and Robert Stadlober, two of Germany's finest young actors.

About the Movie: Tobi and Achim have been best mates for years. As cox and oarsman, they have lead their rowing club to win several rowing cups in the past and are now looking forward to win a big regatta in the countryside of Germany. But this trip isn't your usual summer camp experience and problems soon arise. As Achim's relationship with his girlfriend Sandra, who's also on the team, grows more and more serious, Tobi starts to realize that his feelings for Achim run much deeper than he's willing to admit to himself. He feels confused, unsure of himself and increasingly left out by his friend Alex and the team. When Sandra's best friend Anke shows her interest in him, his anxiety starts to grow. When it turns out that the much-anticipated Berlin girls' team has been replaced by a team of athletic, cliché-bursting young gay men, Tobi and his teammates are suddenly forced to grapple with their prejudices, their fears, and, perhaps, their hidden longings. As the tension grows, Tobi, Achim and the others head towards a confrontation as fierce and liberating as the summer storm that's gathering over the lake. And Tobi realizes he has to start facing some facts about himself he didn't dare to face before.

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7. NaPolA - 2004 - Featuring Tom Schilling and Max Reimelt in career-defining performances, from filmmaker Denis Gansel.

About the Movie: As Hitler launches the first major military aggressions of World War II, the strongest and smartest German young men enter exclusive schools known as "Napolas" to train as future leaders of the Third Reich. In 1942, a recruiter from one such Napola sets his sights on Friedrich, a talented adolescent boxer, who sees the training and prestige offered by the Napola as his ticket out of an impoverished family unit run by his anti-Nazi father.

In the Napola, Friedrich learns to fight without pity, becoming a formidable killing machine. Propagandistic classes reinforce a hardened worldview of his Aryan superiority. Meanwhile, Friedrich forms a bond with fellow cadet Albrecht Stein, an aspiring writer and son of the local Nazi governor. Governor Stein dotes on Friedrich, barely masking his contempt for his own son's sensitivity. But Friedrich admires and empathizes with his friend, even though Albrecht criticizes Friedrich's brutality in the ring.

As the war escalates, the school's military training also intensifies. Unscrupulous trainers humiliate the more vulnerable cadets in front of their peers and send the others out on dubious war game exercises. In one such nightmarish event, they instruct Friedrich and Albrecht to shoot escaping POW's who turn out to be unarmed Russian civilians. Tormented with guilt, Albrecht rebels, and Friedrich must choose between his sworn allegiance to the Fuehrer and his best friend's moral imperative.

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Featured Review from the Austin Chronicles: Every movie about the Holocaust should be this good, but few are. Heartbreaking and brutal, its tale of two boys training together at a Napola – an elite school training young Aryan men for service in Hitler’s Third Reich – is as intimate and truthful to its characters as it is powerfully topical and politically brave. The movie is a statement from a nation that is deeply remorseful for its complicity in an attempt to build a genocidal empire but is still struggling to understand how it became complicit. (This statement may well be heeded by the film’s American audiences, as well.) Yet as it explores such broad notions as the unraveling of compassion and the corruptive nature of nationalism, it is at the same time a love story about two young people who just happen to be positioned at a major crossroads in global affairs, and it is successful on both levels. [ read more ]

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What's on your mind? Are you fond of watching German films? Have you seen any of the movies listed above? Any particular favorites? Let us know what you think!
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[  Part 1 - French cinema and Part 2 - Movies from the UK ]