Teutonic tonic

It begins with a melange of static, uneventful shots of everyday life in German cities and countryside, and ends with a meditative piece set in the future when lunar-based Teutonic descendants go into seances to discover this mysterious Deustchland of their ancestors.

In between, other segments focus on a young man's ordeal at Guantanamo Bay, a middle-aged businessman avenging a German newspaper's 'treacherous' decision to ditch the Fraktur typeface and a fantasy meeting between writer Susan Sontag and the Red Army Faction leader, Ulrike Meinhof, in a dingy apartment.

Living up to its pledge of looking at the state of contemporary Germany, Germany 09 - an omnibus vehicle comprising 13 shorts from the country's established and emerging filmmakers - reveals the many faultlines in the German public's psyche. In the words of Tom Tykwer - who initiated the project with producer Dirk Wilutzky and fellow filmmaker Verena Rahmig - the film offers 'a dozen different cinematic interpretations of our native land'.

There's no one single issue which dominates the offerings on show. However, the absence of any works examining the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this month is surprising. 'The topic is very strong in the media, and is very present there - the 20th anniversary is on everybody's mind,' says Goethe-Institut Hongkong director Michael Mueller-Verweyen, who selected Germany 09 as one of the German-language film showcase's key movies this year.

'But among filmmakers it's not the most burning topic ... the topic of integration, however, of accepting Germany as a multicultural country, that may be more of interest for them now.'

The one time that Germany 09 touches on 1989 is in Dominik Graf and Martin Gressman's The Road We Don't Walk Together.