Die Nein-Sager und die Du-Sager


Das zerrissene Europa, die Filmfamilie und die MeToo-Debatte: zur 30. Verleihung der Europäischen Filmpreise in Berlin. Christiane Peitz


Er hoffe, sein Land sei ein Teil von Europa, hatte der Pole Krzysztof Kieslowski bei der allerersten Verleihung der Europäischen Filmpreise gesagt. Der berühmt gewordene Satz erfährt im 30. Jahr der European Film Academy ein deutliches Echo. Gleich drei Auszeichnungen gehen bei der Jubiläumsgala wieder nach Polen.

In ein Land, in dem die Euro-Gala in Breslau 2016 zur politischen Manifestation gegen die Demokratur der PiS-Regierung wurde. In ein Land, in dem Anna Zamecka mit ihrem jetzt preisgekrönten Dokumentarfilm „Communion“ eine 14-Jährige porträtiert, die die Kommunionsfeier für den Bruder auf die Beine stellen und ihre zerrüttete Familie wieder zusammenbringen will. Die auf sich gestellten Kinder – wahrlich nicht nur ein polnisches Thema. Gewonnen hat bei der Gala am Samstag im Haus der Berliner Festspiele auch die Kostümbildnerin Katarzyna Lewinska; der Animationsfilmpreis ging an „Loving Vincent“ von Dorota Kobiela (gemeinsam mit ihrem Regie- und Lebenspartner Hugh Welchman), eine Hommage auch an Polens große Zeichentricktradition.
Europa fällt wieder auseinander

Der Filmpreis war 1988 ins Leben gerufen worden, um den kulturellen Zusammenhalt des vom Eisernen Vorhang geteilten Kontinents zu beschwören. Die Geschichte bewegt sich im Kreis: Heute fällt Europa wieder auseinander, und der Appell ist erneut bitter nötig. Von Respekt, Verantwortung, Solidarität und Freiheit ist traditionell viel die Rede bei den Galas. Die so persönliche wie präsidiale Europa-Verteidigung von Wim Wenders sorgt auch diesmal für Mucksmäuschenstille im Saal. Es geht bei diesem Preis ja nicht um Vermarktungsförderung wie bei den Oscars, sondern um die Selbstbehauptung einer schon wegen der Sprachbarrieren disparaten Kulturlandschaft.

Eine Geste, die den Blick nicht nur auf Schweden und Ruben Östlunds sechs Preise (Rekord!) abräumende Kunstsatire „The Square“ lenkt, sondern vor allem Richtung Osten. Polen, Russland, Ungarn, Serbien, sie alle liegen in Europa, so die Quintessenz dieser Jubiläumsgala. Die westlichen Kinonationen sind in diesem Jahr weitgehend abgehängt, Deutschland kann sich mit Maria Schrader immerhin über den Publikumspreis für ihr Stefan-Zweig-Biopic „Vor der Morgenröte“ freuen. Hochverdient – und die schönste Überraschung des Abends.
Filme sind eine gefährliche Waffe

Da ist die großartige Schauspielerin Aleksandra Borbély aus „Körper und Seele“, die bei den Darstellerinnen Isabelle Huppert und Juliette Binoche aussticht. Oder der aus Jugoslawien stammende Produzent Cedomir Kolar, der den Koproduktionspreis erhält. Oder der seit 2014 in Moskau inhaftierte ukrainische Filmemacher Oleg Sentsov – eine traurige Tradition, dass die Academy nun schon zum vierten Mal seine Freilassung anmahnen muss. Und da ist der Russe Alexander Sokurow, der seinen Ehrenpreis mit eigentümlich pessimistischen Worten entgegennimmt.

Sein Leben lang habe er nach einer filmischen Sprache gesucht, sagt der Regisseur in Berlin. Filme könnten zur gefährlichen Waffe werden, sie seien nur selten Kunst oder ein humanitärer Akt. Seine xenophoben Äußerungen von 2015 über Flüchtlinge, die die europäischen Werte gefährden, haben die Academy offenbar nicht irritiert. Ja, die Kunst ist autonom, und vielleicht ist es ja gut, dass Sokurow die Familienatmosphäre in Berlin ein wenig stört.

Überhaupt prägt der Großfamiliensinn die Gala: Im Programmheft zur Verleihung sind die Stars und großen Namen der letzten 30 Jahre mit Vornamen verzeichnet: Theo, Aki, Gianni, Ken, Lars, Pedro, Catherine, Isabelle, Wolfgang, Michael, Maren und viele andere mehr. Man duzt sich, man kennt sich. Sokurows Auftritt macht klar: So einfach ist es mit dem Duzen dann doch nicht.

Im Vorjahr in Breslau war der Brexit ein Riesenthema - wofür dort nicht zuletzt Ken Loach gesorgt hatte. In diesem Jahr entschuldigt sich Stephen Frears für sein Land, das den Europäern so viel Ärger bereitet - und erntet Riesenapplaus. Das größere politische Thema in Berlin: die MeToo-Debatte. Vier gestandene Produzentinnen aus England, Polen, Rumänien und Schweden stehen auf der Bühne, fassen sich an den Händen und ermuntern zum kollektiven Widerstand gegen Übergriffe und strukturellen Sexismus. Womit wir bei den Frauen wären. Sie gewinnen 6,5 der insgesamt 22 Preise, knapp 30 Prozent. Keine schlechte, aber auch keine überragende Quote.

Wo bleiben die Regisseurinnen?

Ein schiefes Gesamtbild: Präsident Wenders, Sokurow, Kolar und der Abräumer Ruben Östlund – trotz Vorstandschefin Agnieszka Holland, trotz Geschäftsführerin Marion Döhring hinterlässt die European Film Academy den Eindruck, dass die wahren Meister eben doch die Männer sind. Frauen, klar, sind im Kommen, sie kämpfen tapfer und mit begeisternder Leidenschaft. Urkomisch, wenn Julie Delpy statt einer Dankesrede für den kleineren Ehrenpreis einen Hilferuf zur Restfinanzierung ihres nächsten Films, "My Zoe" inszeniert, mit zittrigen Händen und flatternden Notizzetteln - und sich selbst per Tombola als Hauptgewinn anbietet, als Frühstückspartnerin am nächsten Morgen. Dank Delpys schauspielerischem Können ist der Auftritt nicht peinlich, aber ein ähnliche Ulknummer von einem Mann? Unvorstellbar. Hinterher, bei der Afterparty, ist sie mit ihren Losen im Nicht-Vip-Bereich nirgends zu sehen. Aber sie war da, hat tatsächlich Lose verkauft, wie hinterher zu erfahren ist.

Frauen als Hauptgewinnerinnen? In 30 Jahren haben gerade mal fünf den Lebenswerk-Preis erhalten, davon nur eine Regisseurin, Agnès Varda. Maren Ade, 2016 mit „Toni Erdmann“die Abräumerin, bleibt vorerst eine Ausnahme. Wie viel angemessener wäre es gewesen, wenn der beste Film 2017, Ildíko Enyedis meisterlich stilisiertes Melodram „Körper und Seele“, sich die Ehre mit „The Square“ geteilt hätte. Ein Preis fürs beste Drama, einer in der Kategorie Komödie, hier eine magische Liebesgeschichte, da die sarkastische Abrechnung mit den Alphatieren der Kunstszene. Aber so könnte nur eine Jury abwägen. Die anonymen Wahlkreuze von 3400 wahlberechtigten Academy-Mitgliedern entfalten eine andere, eher Zufällen und Launen geschuldete Dynamik. In der Kunst, und nur da, hat Demokratie manchmal nichts zu suchen.

Daniel Brühl Talks about Recreating History in “7 Days in Entebbe” (Interview)
March 13, 2018


German actor Daniel Brühl might be best known to American audiences nowadays for playing Helmut Zemo in Captain America: Civil War or more recently as Dr. Laszlo Kreizler in TNT’s drama series The Alienist.

Brühl was a prolific young actor in German films for many years before breaking out in American films like The Bourne Ultimatum and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and in 2013, Brühl received Golden Globe and SAG nominations for his role in Ron Howard’s Rush, and since then he’s bounced between bigger studio movies and smaller ones.

Brühl’s latest film 7 Days in Entebbe, directed by José Padilha (Robocop), is based on the true events that happened in June 1976 when an Air France plane travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by two Palestinians and two left-wing German radicals wanting to get Israel to release a number of jailed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The plane eventually landed in Uganda where the country’s dangerous President Idi Amin gets involved in the negotiations with Israel. (You may remember this happening in The Last King of Scotland in which Forest Whitaker played Amin.)

Brühl plays Wilfried Böse, a German revolutionary who takes part in the hijacking along with Rosamund Pike’s Brigitte Kuhlmann, the two of them not realizing what they’re getting involved with when the Palestinian rebels threaten to kill the Jews on board if Israel doesn’t meet their demands.

The Tracking Board sat down with Brühl earlier this week to talk about Entebbe, but we also tried our best to sneak in a question to find out if Zemo from Captain America: Civil War might return to the MCU sometime in the future (maybe to lead the Thunderbolts?) but he was far too savvy. (Sorry, time was so limited, and I ran out of time before I could Brühl about The Alienist.)


You obviously weren’t born when this actually happened, so I was curious whether you heard about what happened in Entebbe before you got the script?

Daniel Brühl: Yeah, it rang a bell, but there was another plane hijacking of a Lufthansa plane in ’77, a year later in Mogadishu, and probably because it as a German plane and with German hostages, this is better remembered. It was another successful military mission in that case, and I think after that they stopped doing these plane hijackings. I knew about Entebbe, and what was interesting for me in general was going back in time and understanding a bit better where these young Germans, these activists and terrorists, came from. That’s something that always fascinated me and interested me, because as you say, I was born in ’78, but I remember conversations of my parents talking about the ‘60s and ‘70s, about the huge rage that my, that this generation in my country felt towards their own country. A huge feeling of guilt and the anger resulting of the fact that still many Nazis were in high-ranking positions and the politics and so on.

And then as an actor, it interested me to get into the mindset of someone who came from a safe background, being a publisher and being politically-active, to then go that extra step and become an extremist and a terrorist and participating in an operation in which Jewish passengers were hijacked on a plane, but being a left-wing terrorist fighting fascism in his own country. That was something unprecedented, and that interested me.

I was pleased to read the script, because it showed me an interesting multi-perspective version of that. I had seen one of the films, one of the versions. In both films or I think there might even be three films. The famous German actors portraying my part, Klaus Kinski and Horst Bucholz. The version I remember was very black and white, quite trashy as I thought, and that’s why I was thinking it would be interesting to make a more current and more complex version of this event to maybe hopefully attract also a younger generation and to remind them what had happened back then. To also understand better where we’re standing right now.


That’s partially why I like films like this and Munich. I was alive when both events took place but I was very young and probably didn’t watch as much news as young people do these days, so it would have been filtered through my parents. Did you do any research into the person you were playing on your own or was he pretty well laid out in the script?

No, we still had to do a lot research, Rosamund and I, and there isn’t that much that you can read about our characters. In Germany, there’s a lot of books and material about Baader-Meinhof and other terrorists, but not so much about them. The good thing was that Kate Solomon and Gregory Burke, the producer and scriptwriter, are real experts on terrorism in the ’70s, because they have been researching it for a long time for other movies and projects. I think Kate has been closely working with Paul Greengrass on various occasions, so she’s very dedicated. They had a lot of interesting material, which they shared with us, like long interviews with eye witnesses, the former boyfriend of Rosamund Pike’s character, and then unpublished texts and really rare stuff that you wouldn’t find on Amazon or in a book shop.

That helped a lot, and then also conversations with the real people, with Jacques LeMoyne who was the flight engineer. That, especially for me, that was a very important conversation and background information. The fact that he said to me that he was with him in the very last moments, and he looked into the barrel, and he could tell that it was really a deliberate decision of my character not to kill the hostages and not to kill anyone, was crucial for me in portraying this character, because also for me I had to take a certain path in portraying Wilfried Böse. I had to also make a decision for that very final moment.

In general, what interests me in historical subject matter is when there is different positions, different angles, and different perspectives, because this is how history is like. Especially nowadays when you mention watching the news, it is so hard to remind yourself that you are watching and consuming biased news. Even in Europe, when you think that this is a neutral piece of information, you always have to double check. It’s always important. And I learned that very soon in my family. I remember arguments between my father and my mother, because they were discussing about the same topic, but my mother was seeing it from a Spanish side and my father from the German, then we had some French family. I guess as a boy I already learned the complexity of perceiving history and to find out and see the truth. There is no such thing as one simple truth, and this is a good example to show that. You hear all these different voices. You understand the motivations of the Palestinians, of the Germans, and of the Israelis and this is important to show that in a film. In the previous versions Kinski and Buchholz were coldblooded, ruthless murderers and monsters, and then the soldiers were just the heroic superheroes, and I guess in real life it’s different.


One thing I like about your career is that as a German actor, you’ve been able to find different roles, because unfortunately, as a German actor, you’re often wanted to play Nazis. There can be a lot of range in that as seen in Inglourious Basterds in your scenes with Christoph Waltz. How do you look for roles and is it very conscious or deliberate to avoid those clichés?

You have to be careful to not be put in a box and to be typecast, and to have that image, because that happens really quickly. It’s interesting depending on the cultural background, as you said, for us Germans, that can happen, that you end up only being offered the Nazi parts. There were many that I refused doing. I only decided to participate in a project when it really convinced me, and when I thought this is a strong piece and a strong script. But I have South American friends who say they always have to play the Narcos, the drug dealers. I have Turkish friends in Germany, and an actor, one of my close friends, who said, “I’m so sick of getting offered parts for terrorists,” so I guess every one of us has these prejudices that we feel, or these images that people have depending on our nationality.


If you watch a lot of foreign films, as I do, you get to see a lot more range from foreign actors, as well. Getting back to Entebbe, I wanted to ask about working with José. Did he have a lot of those people you mentioned on set, like some of the survivors of the incident?

Yeah, and that was crucial also for the raid, because we were working with one of the soldiers, in fact the one who killed my character, and so he helped the other actors and extras to recreate the raid in the most authentic way. He was feeling a bit weird when he saw how we rebuilt this terminal in Malta, because he said it was so incredibly accurate that it’s made him feel, yeah, it was a strong huge impact on him, to go back there and to talk about this and to recreate the raid, and to see these extras playing the hostages, of course, was emotionally very intense for him.


I can only imagine what it must have been like, even forty years later. What about working with Rosamund? I’ve met her a few times and she’s always been a bit of an enigma. Not sure if you’ve found that working with her as an actor or not.

She’s enigmatic, but she is electrifying. She has a very peculiar energy and intensity that is very contagious. As a partner, as an acting colleague, I can only say that you receive so much from that energy and that courage. Also, what impressed me is that fact that she decided to shoot these scenes that we had in German. I was told that she was able to speak German, but I thought this is something that actors sometimes do, you know? Like we’re into horseback riding, and we can also speak German or we speak Japanese and then it doesn’t work out… but she got really into it and she was so convincing that on day two, I completely forgot about the fact that she’s actually not German. We both felt that this tension when we shot the German takes was much stronger than the English version that we always shot back to back. This alone just impressed me, the courage, because obviously this is not her language, but she was so good at that. Yeah, I’m a huge admirer of her work and even more so now after having worked with her.


While doing research for this, I realized that you were also in both of Julie Delpy’s movies, “2 Days in Paris” and “2 Days in New York,” so is it true that you’re doing another movie with Julie?

We’re planning one right now. We’re going to shoot it pretty soon, and I think we’re starting in May. I’m very proud that she wants to work with me again, and in this case, I will also be coming aboard as a producer because she’s doing it with a production company in Germany that I joined, as so I’m very happy that we can help her out. We’ll shoot most of it in Berlin, and it’s another wonderful script she wrote, and I’m happy to also be in it as an actor.


Before you go, you played Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War, so does Marvel give you any heads up to keep time free to appear in other movies down the road? Do they tell you anything?

Even if they would have told me, I wouldn’t tell you, but they didn’t kill me, so he’s still alive.
Okay, I’m sure someone must have told you that Zemo starts the Thunderbolts, and that’s a really cool comic, so I had to ask.

Lior Ashkenazi Goes International
BY Gerri Miller | PUBLISHED Mar 28, 2018 | Arts

Lior Ashkenazi, a three-time winner of an Ophir Award from the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, is a big star in Israel with films such as “Footnote,” “Walk on Water” and “Late Marriage” to his credit. Now, with three new films in or soon coming to theaters, the 48-year-old actor is receiving international acclaim as well.

His latest Ophir was for his performance in “Foxtrot,” as a father who receives the devastating news that his soldier son has been killed in action. Ashkenazi called the role “The most difficult thing I have ever done in my career.”

“Everybody in Israel knows someone who lost a member of his family, in a war or terror attacks. The grief, unfortunately, is surrounding us,” Ashkenazi said in an interview via Skype. “The most difficult thing for me [in the “Foxtrot” role] was trying to deliver the sorrow. I thought that maybe I could try do it physically. So, I didn’t sleep for two days before the first shooting day. And it worked. It was like vertigo. There was no time and space. Everything was almost in slow motion.”

He kept up the sleep deprivation on shooting days — sleeping only on weekends — and wore no makeup on set. “What you see in the first act of the movie is for real. Maybe I went too far,” he said.

Ashkenazi can also be seen portraying former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in “7 Days in Entebbe,” a film about Israel’s mission to rescue hijacked plane hostages from a Ugandan airfield in 1976.

“I didn’t sleep for two days before the first shooting day. And it worked. It was like vertigo. There was no time and space. Everything was almost in slow motion.” — Lior Ashkenazi

For Ashkenazi, who played a fictional Israeli prime minister in “Norman” (2016) opposite Richard Gere, playing a national icon like Rabin was daunting.

“I couldn’t ignore the burden on my shoulders,” he said. “And I didn’t want to imitate him, as in a sketch. So, I tried to find nuances, like his smoking. He smoked three packs per day. And I talked to his staff and watched a lot of footage, including home videos. The [Rabin] family helped a lot.”

Ashkenazi’s newest release, “Shelter,” is an espionage thriller in which he plays an Israeli intelligence agent. The film’s director, Eran Riklis, gave him his first TV role more than 20 years ago. “He’s brilliant and made a wonderful adaptation of the story,” the actor said. “I couldn’t resist.”

Ashkenazi was born in Ramat Gan to parents who came from Istanbul, Turkey, in 1964 “and brought with them all the Sephardic traditions. My mother tongue is Ladino. I see myself first as an Israeli,” said the married father of two daughters. “I’m Jewish mainly when I’m abroad. We do celebrate the holidays — Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover — but not in a religious way, more like as a tradition of our people.”

Until a few years ago, Ashkenazi was primarily a stage actor, but he’s now concentrating on movies, and writing and directing for the theater, with the occasional TV project. He’s currently shooting the music drama series “The Conductor,” playing the title role. He’s next set to shoot “Esau,” based on the Meir Shalev novel, with Harvey Keitel; and “My Zoe,” written, directed and starring Julie Delpy, in the fall. And he has plans to direct a new play at Habima, the national theater of Israel.

For Ashkenazi, an increasing involvement in international projects “is more challenging for me, dealing with a foreign language and breaking my usual routine,” he said. But he’s ready for whatever the future has in store for him. “I’m always looking forward.”

“Foxtrot” and “7 Days in Entebbe” are in theaters now. “Shelter” opens April 6 at the Laemmle Town Center 5, Monica and Ahrya Fine Arts theaters; and April 7 at the Laemmle Playhouse 7.

Interview mit Fraser und Richard nach dem Urban Q&A:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_HVZ9yMMcg&sns=em