BAGUIO CITY – Nine German films were featured at national artist for film Kidlat Tahimik’s Ili-likha Artists Village theater during the 4th German Film Week that ended on December 19.
The lineup is made up of all award-winning films with “Good Bye, Lenin!”, a 2003 romantic, comedy-drama film that stars Daniel Bruhl, who would later be cast in hit films like “Bourne Supremacy” and as Helmut Zemo, the chief antagonist in “Captain America: Civil War.”
Nominated for Best Foreign Film during the 2004 Golden Globe Awards and winners in Best European Film in 2003 and Blue Angel Wolfgang Becker in 2004, the film has a setting in October 1989 in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell.
Bruhl is cast as Alex, who is left to tend to his ailing Socialist mother suffering from a weak heart.
Afraid that, his mother will die if the news reached her that Communist Germany is no more, he transformed their house into a kind of socialist-era museum, a lie which became a major scam when his neighbors were drawn into making his mom believe “that (Russian Communist leader Vladimir) Lenin really did win after all.”
All About Me, or Der Junge Muss an Die Frische Luft, is a 2018 film by Caroline Link that won the Highest Grossing Film, Outstanding Feature Film and best director of 2018 in the German Films Award.
Set in 1972 in German’s Ruhr Valley, it is about Hans Peter or Hape, a chubby kid who is full of self-confidence, since he is capable of making people laugh.
But the story turns dark when his mother loses her sense of smell and taste due to chronic sinusitis leading to her depression, and the sadness due to her depression makes Hape act out his comedic side the more.
“Gundermann” is a 2018 film that won the best screenplay this year in the Romy Gala Austria, where it was also nominated for best film and favorite actor.
Spiegel De, one of the most widely read German-language news website, describes it as: “One of the richest, most sophisticated and greatest films about the GDR (German Democratic Republic or East Germany).”
The 2018 comedy “100 Things” and the 2007 best foreign film of the Academy Awards and Best European Film (2007) “The Lives of Others”, “Berlin Blues” (2003), “Barbara” (2012), “25 Km/H” and “The Keeper”, “Trautmann”, a 2008 film of German, UK and Ireland production, were also featured during the week-long film fest backed by the Goethe Institut.
Ili-likha is a three-story avant-garde structure along Assumption Road that sprouted from the mind of Kidlat Tahimik and his artist-sons, namesake Kidlat and Kawayan.
Artists own and manage the various coffee shops within the building that was built from scraps like bottles but with a sound foundation.
Exhibits like painting, sculpture, and film fests are held regularly and it is the only artists’ community within the city’s central business district. **Pigeon M. Lobien/ PNA
