Fokus 2016: season of German cinema

The programme for the second Fokus, the annual Scotland-wide festival celebrating the diversity of voices found in German cinema, has just been announced, and once again it offers up a fascinating snapshot of the country's contemporary film scene.

“Film is the contemporary expression of the arts that probably excites us most,” says Nikolai Petersen, Director of the Goethe-Institut Glasgow. “And film is much more than Hollywood!”

With the second edition of Fokus, Petersen and his team invite audiences all across Scotland to “explore Germany as a multifaceted country with a distinct artistic language and place within European film.”

One of the highlights of the season looks to be opening film Hedi Schneider Is Stuck, a wry character study that mines comedy from the unlikely topic of clinical depression. Director Sonja Heiss will be in Scotland to present the film at the opening gala at Filmhouse on 25 November.

Heiss is one of four female directors featured during the festival, which promises “a strong focus on showcasing the impressive range of aesthetics created by female directors working in Germany.” The other films in this strand include Nicolette Krebitz's WILD, which tells the story of one woman’s relationship with a wild animal; an alternative look at the festive season in Theresa von Eltz’s 4 Kings, which centres on a group of teenagers spending Christmas in a psychiatric emergency unit; and 24 Weeks by Anne Zohra Berrached, which follows a woman facing the agonising decision whether to have a late-term abortion as she learns her child will have Down's syndrome and a serious heart defect.

Other interesting titles look to be historical drama The People vs Fritz Bauer and We Are Young. We Are Strong, which are described as “works which implicitly speak to the current debate around the new far right movement by looking at crucial events in German history.”

We Are Young. We Are Strong might be more than implicit: Burhan Qurbani's sophomore film looks at immigration by fictionalising the xenophobic riots against asylum seekers that gripped Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992. Jonas Nay, the lead of Deutschland 83, stars.

The resurgence of nationalism and its reflection in popular culture is also addressed in the fascinating documentary From Caligari to Hitler, which follows the development of cinema during the Weimar Republic up to the Nazi era.

The documentary is complemented by two Weimar-era classics: Fritz Lang's chilling The Testament of Dr Mabuse and Robert Siodmak's influential experimental silent film People on Sunday.

If you’re more interested in something lighter in these dark times, there’s hipster coming-of-age comedy Oh Boy (imagine Jim Jarmusch in Berlin) and the colourful family blockbuster Fiddlesticks, which follows a band of youngsters as they team up to liberate their elderly relatives from a care home.

Filmhouse Head of Programming Rod White adds that Fokus is an opportunity to sample a national cinema that gets scant regard in the UK film scene. “German cinema is currently somewhat under-represented in the sphere of UK film distribution," he says, "so we’re very pleased to be able to give this great European filmmaking nation the exposure it deserves, taking its place in our annual programme alongside our festivals for Spanish, Italian and French cinema, to name but three.”

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Fokus runs 25 Nov to 4 Dec at Filmhouse, Edinburgh; 3-27 Dec at Belmont, Aberdeen; 7-18 Dec at Eden Court, Inverness; 4-8 Jan at Dundee Contemporary Arts; 26-28 Jan at Ayr Film Society; and Glasgow Film Theatre, dates TBC