The German Currents Film Festival in the year 2024 has a surprising surfeit of films directed by women. The Festival opens on October 11 with a Los Angeles premiere of a comedy/drama by a multi-award-winning woman writer-director Sonja Heiss. It’s the German box office and festival favorite, WHEN WILL IT BE AGAIN LIKE IT NEVER WAS BEFORE. The evening is a happy occasion to be followed by a reception at the Egyptian Theater.
Director Sarah Neumann’s feature-film debut, BEYOND THE BLUE BORDER, set in August 1989, concerns a Olympics-level swimmer caught in personal and geopolitical turmoil of life in the rigid system of GDR/East Germany.
Asli Özarslan’s debut feature, ELBOW, gives an intense portrait of 17-year-old Hazal, a Turkish-German teen living in Berlin as she struggles to hold her ground in a society that seems to cast her aside.
Among the Festival’s curated selections, THE GLORY OF LIFE looks good to me. It, too, has a woman prominent in it creation: the multi-award-winning cinematographer and co-director Judith Kaufmann. A docudrama, it concerns the final year of writer Franz Kafka’s life. Stricken by tuberculosis Kafka meets a young governess while convalescing at a Baltic Sea resort. The two lovers progress in their relationship to Berlin, and onward, rather downward, to a sanatorium near Vienna. Far from “Kafka-esque,” this film portends full-on romance.
THE GLORY OF LIFE is set in the summer/fall 1923, which, if you check your calendar, is 101 years ago. The movie’s Jewish themes, its female director/cinematographer, and acclaimed costumes all tick boxes of attraction to me.
The Festival, running from October 11 – 14, 2024, is produced by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and the American Cinematheque in cooperation with the German Consulate General, and with the support of Condor, The Friends of Goethe, ELMA, and the German Film Office The screenings are free to the public. All one needs do is register for tickets on the website — and show up. German Currents will take place at the American Cinematheque (Egyptian & Los Feliz 3 Theatres), the Gardena Cinema, and the Goethe-Institut space, rooted in the MacArthur Park neighborhood community.
THE GLORY OF LIFE | German Currents Film Festival | Los Feliz 3 Theatre | Sat. Oct 12, 7 pm