Participants of Karlovy Vary, San Sebastián and Rotterdam Film Festivals are all featured in the new German cinema program, the “German Wave”.

“Crossing Boundaries”, the first Florian Flicker’s film after a 12-year break, elaborates upon a German love triangle. The movie was screened in “Spectrum” program at the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Thomas Arslan’s “Gold” represents this year’s Berlin IFF competition program. Director’s debut was at the Berlinale (Panorama) in 1994, with “Mach die Musik leiser”, followed by “Geschwister” and “Dealer” (1999, Forum, Berlinale). “Gold” is a story of a group of German immigrants who make the long journey to the gold fields up north. Critics claim that Nina Hoss, who performed the main part in the film, managed to create one of the most powerful female characters. The film itself is seen as homage to the Western genre.  

“Love Steaks” by Jacob Lass, featured in the Karlovy Vary IFF competition, is likely to be named our program’s most daring film. It stars two young German actors, Lana Cooper and Franz Rogowski.

Jeshua Dreyfus’s “Never Mind” represents Switzerland in “German Wave”. It’s the first feature film by the director who was 18 when he shot his first notable movie, a 25-minute-long documentary about India’s cultural variety. 

Another representative of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s competition program is Oskar Roehler’s “Sources of Life”. The film was nominated on Crystal Globe. The director is the son of writer Gisela Elsner and the writer Klaus Roehler. He started out as a screenwriter. Oskar Roehler is mostly known in Germany for his movie “No Place to Go”, that was called an intimate and sensual portrait of a mother.  

“The Dead and the Living” by Barbara Albert entered 2012 San Sebastián IFF Official competition. Director’s third feature film is a story of 25-year-old Sita. It is a journey not only into the dark and loaded past of her own family during World War II, but also into the abyss of European society today. The journey leads Sita from Berlin to Vienna, to Warsaw and to Romania.

Georg Maas’s “Two Lives” brings us back in the 1990s. The director himself first worked for several years as a carpenter and with homeless youths before he studied Film Directing from 1984 to 1991 at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin. In 1997 he was a co-founder of the actor-director-author lab (S.R.A.L.) in Berlin.

Katrine, a war child of Norwegian woman and a German soldier enjoys a happy family life. When a lawyer asks her and her mother to testify in a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of the war children, she refuses. A web of secrets is about to be unveiled and the family has to ask themselves: what carries more weight, the life they had together, or the lie it is based on?