Volker Schlöndorff to give master class at MWFF The noted German director, board member of the prestigious European Film Academy, Volker Schlöndorff, will give a master class at the upcoming Montreal World Film Festival it was announced. “Volker Schlöndorff is one of key members of the New German Cinema, that group of young filmmakers who, with talent, imagination and a daring choice of subjects, radically changed postwar German cinema,” said MWFF President Serge Losique. “...

The noted German director, board member of the prestigious European Film Academy, Volker Schlöndorff, will give a master class at the upcoming Montreal World Film Festival it was announced. “Volker Schlöndorff is one of key members of the New German Cinema, that group of young filmmakers who, with talent, imagination and a daring choice of subjects, radically changed postwar German cinema,” said MWFF President Serge Losique. “It is a great privilege to be hosting his master...

The 33rd edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) initiated its marathon 24 day run on Friday, May 25, with 18 films bursting out of the starting gates at six festival venues strategically located around the city from the landmark Space Needle to the University District (and a seventh across the lake in satellite city Bellevue). The opening event I chose to attend was "An Evening with Lisa Gerrard", hypnotic Australian song-bird/composer, introducing the screening of a mystico-...

German author, Nobel Prize laureate Gunther Grass, is a high profile visitor here in connection with the screening of a new Polish film based on one of his novels, "The Call of the Toad". Grass was actually born in Dansk in 1927 when it was a German city known as Danzig, so this amounts to a kind of home-town visitation. His novel, "The Tin Drum" also had a WW II Danzig setting and was made into a highly acclaimed film by Volker Schloendorff in Germany (1979) which featured the Polish actor Dan...