MON. , Nov. 4, 2019 @ 03.00 PM – BUY TICKETS!
Germany / Austria 2018,color, 187 min
Director: Heinrich Breloer
Cast:
Burghart Klaußner, Tom Schilling, Adele Neuhauser, Lou Strenger, Mala Emde, Karolina Horster, Trine Dyrholm, Franz Hartwig, Ernst Stötzner, Friederike Becht, Leonie Benesch, Maria Dragus, Laura de Boer
Bertolt Brecht, a theatre revolutionary, poet of the state, outsider, looks back on his life in 1956, the year of his death, in East Berlin: from provocations in the Augsburg of the First World War, to the early poetic and amorous height flights in Munich and Berlin in the 1920s, his escape from Hitler and US exile, followed by his later years caught in a dilemma between timeless classic and a failing GDR class fighter, an inflexible free man and a compromised Artist.
„I will show the world how it really is,” the pupil Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht told a friend, and he said: “I’ll come right after Goethe.” It was an early mission, and it looked like pure megalomania. The two-parter traces the paths and wrong ways in which the gifted sickly, shy and at the same time cheeky boy finally, despite the most turbulent times, became the most influential playwright of the German language in the world – almost as much hated as admired on his way. Brecht’s love and friendship relationships, the competing ones, the temporary ones, the lifelong ones, are closely linked to this unique career.
Over a period of 40 years, Heinrich Breloer tells the story of the life of the most frequently played German playwright of the 20th century, a life so moved by art, women and contemporary history. By the end of the 1970s, Heinrich Breloer had already approached the figure of Brecht with a television documentary and had many conversations with contemporary witnesses. Numerous interviews with Brecht’s employees and companions from recent years were added to the current film. Together with documentary material from the archives and intensive research, they complete the documentary fiction.
Awards
2019 – Nomination “Deutscher Schauspielpreis” – Adele Neuhauser
Biography
Heinrich Breloer
Born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany in 1942, he studied German and philosophy followed by a doctorate in literature and theatre at the University of Hamburg and then became a freelance film and television critic. He made his directorial debut in 1976 with Horst Königstein, with whom he collaborated on further films until 1982. In 1997 he caused a sensation with Todesspiel, about the kidnapping and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer. His four-part mini-series Die Manns. Ein Jahrhundertroman won numerous prizes including a Grimme Award and the Bavarian and the German TV Awards. His 2008 novel adaptation Buddenbrooks was his first fiction film to be released in cinemas.
Filmography (selection)
1993 Wehner – die unerzählte Geschichte; TV movie 1997 Todesspiel; TV documentary 2001 Die Manns – ein Jahrhundertroman (The Manns – Novel of a Century); TV movie 2005 Speer und Er; TV movie 2008 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks – The Decline of a Family) 2018 Brecht
Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2019