Film studies: away days
As cinematic showcases go, Goethe-Institut Hongkong's Two Days in Europe - and Elsewhere offers exactly what its name suggests. Revolving around protagonists facing a variety of problems - a suicidal woman mourning the death of her husband, a young photographer on a house-swapping holiday, two brothers heading to a monastery to atone for their past - the films all feature Germans in exile, living their lives in environs that are both foreign and fresh.
'German filmmakers don't look to shoot only in Germany any more,' says Michael Mueller-Verweyen, Goethe-Institut Hongkong's director. 'We look at topics as the topics come, and look for places where we can treat the topic. The world's bigger. It reflects a global information market.'
Most of the films included in Two Days - which will take place at the Broadway Cinematheque this weekend - deal with the desire (or failure) to connect with others.
Robert Thalheim's And Along Come Tourists, for instance, is about a young German man's experience serving his national service at the memorial centre at Auschwitz, as he tries to befriend a Holocaust survivor colleague and woo his Polish interpreter; Marseille, by Angela Schanalec, sees a young woman coming to terms with her new life in the French port city, the result of her attempt to escape the harsh German winter by swapping homes with a French student. Hans Geissendoerfer's Snowland centres on a writer's journey to the far north of Sweden, where she intends to take her own life and follow her husband to the grave.
Doris Doerrie's Enlightenment Guaranteed (right) is about two brothers who lose everything and try to reconcile things through a dalliance with Zen. Michael Schorr's Schultze Gets the Blues sees the titular laid-off hero seeking truth (and indulging his love of folk music and fishing) in Louisiana's bayous.
Rounding off the collection is Kurt Hoffman's I Often Think of Piroschka, a film made in 1955 that offers an interesting contrast with the complexities of the more recent pieces about Germans abroad. The film is a fairly straightforward romance (between a German student spending summer in rural Hungary, and the daughter of a local stationmaster) that is as much driven by an urge to display the beauty of Hungarian landscapes as cultural dislocation.
Mueller-Verweyen says the age of national cinema 'may be over'. 'We still hear about South African or British film weeks and we are all proud of our own cinema. But sorry. Artistic filmmaking is no longer respecting national borders and the approach we had.'