Among the 12 nominees for this year’s German Film Critics‘ Award were four films by current and former students of the HFBK Hamburg. Our film critic presents the very different and multifaceted films, two of which were also honored in the end.
A mountain village in deserted twilight. Street lamps color the darkness with artificial light, geese chatter, a thunderstorm is brewing. An alpine documentary? Then the protagonist, whose name Margarita (Alice Ona Crepaz-Fuentes) we only learn later, enters the frame. She walks through alleyways, past fields. Her movement is a single, late-summer meander, her gaze curious. She pauses on a wall ledge and observes a garden party with dancing teenagers, she peers through a window behind which an old woman spits into her shot glass and drinks beer with her husband.
Everything seems everyday and yet enraptured in the short feature film “Ich hab dich tanzen sehn”, in which Sarah Pech, who is currently completing her Master’s degree at the HFBK, sends a teenager through her own North Tyrolean home village. A dreamlike film about perception, which finds a promising imagination in reality at the latest when Margarita and a boy play at chopping wood without an axe. The sound of the blade splitting wood is enough.
At the German Film Critics‘ Award, which is presented annually by the German Film Critics‘ Association, “Ich hab dich tanzen sehn” was named best short film in February. “In the spirit of the carrier-bag theory of fiction, the short film adopts a childlike mode of perception through which the world presents itself re-enchanted to construct a uniquely feminine perspective – a nocturnal and inquisitive gaze of a young flâneuse and benevolent voyeur,” was the jury’s statement.
12 films were honored in just as many categories at this year’s awards ceremony at the Berlin Academy of the Arts – an honor that highlights the diversity of German filmmaking. The nominees included a total of four films of different styles by current and former HFBK Hamburg students, two of which also won prizes.
In addition to Pech, André Siegers was delighted to receive the prize for the best experimental film. In his HFBK graduation film “Die Stimme des Ingenieurs” (supervisor: Pepe Danquart), Siegers observes his father Konrad Siegers. He slowly and irrevocably loses his voice due to an illness – a circumstance that the engineer works against with articulation exercises and technical know-how. The father articulates “voice, sound, word, sky, village” at the beginning of the film and the director shows what is being described in the Saussurean sense. His father is working on a digital speech program that is to become his speech organ by means of his recorded and edited voice.
“The Voice of the Engineer” is a sober and loving portrait that, contrary to the dystopian narrative, does not demonize technology and the use of AI, but rather sees it as an opportunity. With a wink, because the high-tech house of the pensioners with the robot vacuum cleaner and lawnmower also has something comical about it. Not to mention the scene in which Konrad Siegers asks Siri about the weather in Gütersloh in his cracked voice and is told the weather in Beijing.
Konrad Siegers, as his son’s film shows, is a tinkerer who wants to preserve his voice with all the means at his disposal. He doesn’t want to sound like a daytime announcer, says the old man, after all, a voice belongs to a person. The full extent of his acoustic identity is revealed when it emerges that the engineer was a talented sawyer. The jury of the German Film Critics‘ Award found that the film revolves around the moment when illness breaks into what was just normality, without lamenting, but with staged wit and great dramaturgical skill. “Cool, clever and yet sensitive, the film stages technological strangeness as a necessity for human individuality.”
Mengzhu Xue’s “Before then / O Ma”, which was also nominated for best short film, is also about language and identity. Can language be a liberation and a barrier? This is exactly what the director explores in her multi-layered experimental documentary by having her beloved Chinese grandmother read out a letter written in Hànzì in English. The old woman can read the Chinese characters, but at the same time does not understand what Mengzhu Xue is revealing to her and to us in a language that is foreign to her. Before she dies, she wants to tell her grandmother a secret, it says. And later: „I am bisexual. I like girls more than boys (…). But I still feel sorry for hiding it from you“.
The unspeakable is spoken by the grandmother and yet remains hidden from the elderly woman in this film, which is also inscribed with an awareness of the moments captured on film and the transience of every second. We follow the director in hand-held camera shots to her grandfather’s gravestone, which is being scrupulously cleaned, and in a video conversation with her mother, tears well up in her eyes. „I’m afraid to think if this is the last time. It makes me sad. I can’t face your dead“ her grandmother reads out shortly before the end of the film.
With atmospheric shots that drift off into the realm of dreams just at the point when the old woman nods off in front of the computer, Mengzhu Xue explores the transgenerational and cultural rifts with loved ones that we want to be close to but can never fully open up to. Language, as “Before then / O Ma” tells us in a deeply moving way, can do both: build and tear down boundaries.
The nominee for best feature film debut was “Spirit in the Blood” by HFBK graduate Carly May Borgstrom. In the film, which was released in German cinemas at the end of last year, the Canadian-born filmmaker marries coming-of-age with horror vibes. The distributor has marketed “Spirit in the Blood” as a female update of the 1980s classic “Stand by Me”, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of the Stephen King story “The Corpse” – a not inappropriate comparison.
Whereas in Reiner’s film it was a gang of boys who roam through a forest and experience all kinds of adventures, Borgstrom follows her 14-year-old heroine Emerson (Summer H. Howell) in her German-Canadian co-production. “Thanks” to her parents, she has ended up in a remote, deeply religious community. At school, she is the outsider – “Why do you have a boy’s name?” -She escapes into daydreams and comics and is fascinated by the forest, which seems to absorb everything in the colorful film.
With her new friend Delilah (Sarah-Maxine Racicot), Emerson goes into the countryside and, inspired by her comics, celebrates an occult ritual in which blood also plays a role. The ritual is supposed to give them strength against whatever is lurking in the forest and has recently snatched up a classmate. Is there really a cougar or something supernatural behind it? Teen horror plays productively with this question.
“With you, anything feels possible”, Delilah attests to her friend, thus also describing the broad, genre-affiliated associative space that the film opens up effectively and with an emphatic view for the young women. In “Spirit in the Blood”, the hopes and fears of adolescence manifest themselves in the opaque forest, which becomes a space of fear and a place of promise.