Presenting the award, the Oldenburg jury praised the film as a subtle and intense coming-of-age story, noting how it “masterfully guides us through the delicate yet profound journey of a young girl whose dreams and hopes are threatened by forces seeking to silence her.”
Oldenburg’s acting awards, named after legendary American character actor Seymour Cassel, went to Irish actor John Connors for his performance in Jason Byrne and Kevin Treacy’s Crazy Love, and Sabrina Amali for her turn in Nancy Biniadaki’s Maysoon.
In Crazy Love, Connors plays a suicidal man who voluntarily checks in to a mental hospital for treatment, only to fall in love with a schizophrenic patient who can never leave. “In every seemingly unremarkable moment on screen, the full complexity of the human heart and soul resonates,” the jury said of Connors’ performance.
John Connors in ‘Crazy Love’
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Amali in Maysoon plays the titular character, a young Egyptian archaeologist, almost 10 years after the Arab Spring, now living in Berlin with her German boyfriend and their two children. An unexpected threat to her political status unearths old fears that she, again, might lose everything that is dear to her, leading Maysoon to again fight for her independence as a woman and as a citizen. The Oldenburg jury called Amali’s performance “flawlessly authentic and full of nuance… a true tour de force into the soul of a character and the heart of a story that must be heard.”
Sabrina Amali in ‘Maysoon’
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Yun Xie’s Under the Burning Sun received Oldenburg’s Audacity Award, which recognizes originality and boldness. The jury highlighted the director’s debut as a boundary-pushing work combining “painful brutality and visual poetry” in a sweeping epic they compared to John Ford and David Lean.
‘Under the Burning Sun’
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Alejandro Castro Arias took home the Hans Ohlms Award for best debut film with Harakiri, I Miss You. The jury praised its unflinching approach to loneliness and alienation, calling it “an unfiltered and honest reflection on the depths of human despair and the necessity of overcoming it.” Jorge Florez Arcila’s The Flower of Fear won the German Independence Award for best short film, described by the jury as “an extraordinary achievement” that transforms the horrors of child abuse into a work of “magical realism, beauty, and art.”
The audience selected Vincent Grashaw’s Keep Quiet as the winner of the Spirit of Cinema Award.
This year’s retrospective honored American director and music producer James William Guercio, best known for producing Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears and for his sole directorial feature, Electra Glide in Blue (1973). Actor Scott Glenn received a lifetime achievement tribute, with the festival screening four of his films alongside his new feature Eugene the Marine, which opened the event. Don Keith Opper was also honored as a cult figure of the 1980s, presenting four films together with his brother and producing partner Barry Opper.
With support from the Irish embassy in Berlin and Screen Ireland, the festival also highlighted contemporary Irish cinema, with ambassador Maeve Collins attending the opening and participating throughout the program.
Attendance at the Oldenburg Film Festival was up nearly 10 percent this year, with more than 13,000 visitors across the 4-day event, which wrapped on Sunday.
The Oldenburg International Film Festival has unveiled the first titles of its 32nd edition, highlighting a slate of world premieres and debuts with strong showings from Irish cinema and recent festival standouts from Cannes, Karlovy Vary, and Locarno.
Three new Irish productions anchor this year’s program. Jim Sheridan, a six-time Oscar nominee, teams with David Merriman on Re-Creation, which revisits the contested case of Ian Bailey, long linked to the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. The film premiered at Tribeca and features Vicky Krieps and John Connors.
Connors also stars in Crazy Love, the debut feature by stage director Kevin Treacy and cinematographer Jason Byrne. The drama, about an unlikely romance in a psychiatric hospital, will have its world premiere at Oldenburg. Rounding out the Irish spotlight is Horseshoe from Edwin Mullane and Adam O’Keeffe, a family drama with supernatural elements that won Best Irish First Film at Galway.
Additional highlights include Ondřej Provazník’s Broken Voices, which premiered in Karlovy Vary; Vincent Grashaw’s Keep Quiet, which debuted in Locarno and features Lou Diamond Phillips; and The Girl in the Snow, Louise Hemon’s debut that screened in Cannes’ Critics’ Week. The festival will also screen Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy, which premiered at SXSW.
World premieres include Alejandro Castro Arias’ Harakiri, I Miss You, Guillaume Campanacci’s The Silent Sinner, Nancy Biniadaki’s Maysoon, Cris Tapia Marchiori’s Gunman, and Jérôme Vandewattyne’s Belgian satire Summer Hit Machine.
Oldenburg has also unveiled this year’s festival trailer. Directed by Edgar Pêra (Telegraphic Letters, Magnetick Pathways), and co-created with festival director Torsten Neumann, it reimagines H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds with an alien invasion set loose on the streets of the northern German city.
The short film will launch in cinemas nationwide in Germany on Aug. 21. You can check it out now below.
Baby Brother, set in Liverpool, is not easy viewing for a number of reasons. Firmly in the tradition of Britain’s kitchen-sink realism movement, the gritty drama features copious amounts of brutality of both the emotional and physical varieties. It is also demanding of the audience in its storytelling, depicting two separate days years apart and alternating between black-and-white for the past and color for the present.
The results, not surprisingly, are at times disjointed. But Michael J. Long’s directorial debut showcases a stylistic audacity rare in a first-time filmmaker, and there’s no denying the raw power of this wrenching picture, which is receiving its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival.
Baby Brother
The Bottom Line
In the finest tradition of the British New Wave.
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival Cast: Paddy Rowan, Brian Comer, Billy Moore, Julia Ross, AJ Jones, Christian Greenway, Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Kathryn McGurk, Chloe English, Chloe Bailey, Olivia Sloyan, Jak Corrie, Joseph Carter, Matthew Mora Hegerty Director: Michael J. Long Screenwriters: Michael J. Long, Tom Sidney
1 hour 22 minutes
The story revolves around the relationship between Adam (Paddy Rowan) and his younger sibling Liam (Brian Comer), who don’t exactly enjoy the benefits of a happy home life. Their mother (Julia Ross), who struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, is the sort who screams “Get a job or get out!” to Adam when she’s been drinking. Their stepfather is violently abusive, at one point holding a kitchen knife to her throat in front of her sons.
The brothers nonetheless enjoy a close relationship, their propensity for mischief depicted in a very amusing scene in which they sneak into a theater during a rehearsal and engage in mockingly pretentious banter analyzing the performances. Adam is deeply protective of Liam, who dreams of becoming a professional fighter. And he works hard to earn extra money to compensate for the money their mother spends on drugs, even cutting the grass of an elderly neighbor. But he’s ultimately unable to prevent himself from spiraling into violence and addiction as a result of his troubled environment, eventually paying a heavy price for it.
Five years later, Adam returns to see his brother, who now has a very pregnant girlfriend (Kathryn McGurk). “Liam told me all about you,” she says cooly upon their first meeting. “Good things, I hope,” Adam replies hopefully. “Not really,” she retorts. One of the most disturbing episodes involve the sudden reappearance of an old childhood friend (a scary AJ Jones), whose bald head sports an enormous bloody gash. It quickly becomes clear that Adam’s efforts to protect his sibling have failed, with Liam having lapsed into the same troubled behavior as him.
The filmmaker, working from a screenplay co-written with Tom Sidney, delivers a searing portrait of the sort of generational trauma that is all too common when financial struggles are thrown into the mix. Despite the constrains of an obviously very low budget, the film looks terrific, thanks to David Short’s versatile cinematography that proves equally striking in both B&W and color.
Both lead performers are superb, especially in their skillful delineation of the ways in which their characters have changed or not in the five-year interval. Rowan is particularly haunting in the contemporary scenes, displaying the pathos of a man who’s realized his inability to control either his or his brother’s fates. Baby Brother ends on an ambiguous note, but only the most optimistic viewers will be able to see a bright future for these figures beaten down by life, both literally and figuratively.
Full credits
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival Production: Funk Films Cast: Paddy Rowan, Brian Comer, Billy Moore, Julia Ross, AJ Jones, Christian Greenway, Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Kathryn McGurk, Chloe English, Chloe Bailey, Olivia Sloyan, Jak Corrie, Joseph Carter, Matthew Mora Hegerty Director: Michael J. Long Screenwriters: Michael J. Long, Tom Sidney Producers: Michael J. Long, Tom Sidney, Keith Rice Director of photography: David Short Composer: Bobby Locke
1 hour 22 minutes
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Not since Bicycle Thieves has a film focused so determinedly on the theft of a bike as James, receiving its world premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival. Which isn’t to suggest Max Train’s eccentric new comedy has much in common with Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic, aside from similarly being shot in black and white. The sort of picture for which the term “quirky” could have been invented, it bears much more similarity to the early works of Jim Jarmusch, especially in its deadpan style. Probably best appreciated at a midnight screening after a few drinks, the Canadian indie is yet another example of the festival discovering a small-scale gem.
The movie begins with the hard-drinking title character (Dylan Beatch, who co-wrote the screenplay with Train) being violently arrested and then recounting his tale to a detective who wants to know why he has committed so many crimes against a single individual. Cut to the story’s beginning, with the down-on-his-luck, nihilistic James being dumped by his girlfriend because of his anger issues. Living in a single room with a mattress on the floor in a church-run shelter, he can’t even go for a cheap meal in a noodle restaurant without nearly getting a finger cut off by the Japanese cooks he offends.
James
The Bottom Line
A quirky, low-key delight.
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival Cast: Dylan Beatch, Paulina Munoz, James Cowley, Adam Klassen, Yumi Nagashima Director: Max Train Screenwriters: Max Train, Dylan Beatch
1 hour 39 minutes
James’ life changes when he discovers part of a bicycle’s metal frame in the trash and, after scavenging other pieces, assembles a bike which he uses to get a job as a courier. Everything seems to go fine for him for a while until he delivers a package to a butcher shop. Its exotically named owner, Valentin DeWolfe (James Cowley), is an obsessive collector who immediately recognizes the frame of James’ bike as an extremely rare one created by an Italian designer in the 1940s. After his offer to purchase it for an outlandish price is rebuffed, he hires a pair of petty crooks to steal it. Thus begins James’ journey through the underbelly of Vancouver to retrieve his ride and prevent himself from falling back into a downward spiral.
It’s slight stuff, to be sure, and not all of the minimalist humor lands. Some of the jokes, such as the largely unintelligible dialogue of the heavily accented Irish bike thieves, go on long past their expiration date. The episodic storyline, which includes James’ encounters with a mysterious Japanese woman (Yumi Nagashima, excellent) who’s also in pursuit of the bike, meanders more than it should, making the film feel longer than its relatively brief running time.
Despite its flaws, James — the movie, not necessarily the character — proves a low-key, eccentric charmer, at times resembling a vintage silent comedy in its visual humor and central figure who stumbles through life like a modern-day Buster Keaton. And even with its obviously minor budget, the impressionistic debut feature feels extremely polished, with a folk- and blues-infused score (Danny Eberhardt, Sally Jorgensen and Max Train are credited with the music) contributing greatly to its offbeat mood.
The wiry Beatch carries the film ably, finding the dark humor in his protagonist while resisting the urge to play on the audience’s sympathy, and Paulina Munoz delivers a sterling supporting turn as the collector’s sister who finds herself sympathetic to James’ plight.
When Torsten Neumann launched the Oldenburg Film Festival back in 1994, setting up the event as Germany’s answer to Sundance, it was near the peak of the ’90s indie film boom, when the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez were starting to hit the mainstream.
31 years later and indie cinema is living through what feels like a permanent crisis, with the gap between the mainstream and underground growing larger by the day. “Back in the ’90s indie cinema still had some contact with mainstream cinema, the budgets were bigger, and the indie films were screened in cinemas,” says Neumann. “I don’t think that exists anymore. Where are the distribution channels for small films like this?”
But Oldenburg is still giving them a platform. Its 2024 lineup features an ecclectic mix of U.S. and international indies, many of the feature debuts and “no-budget” passion projects. Behind them all, says Neumann, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of this year’s festival, is a passion to”open up new areas [find] new ways of telling stories, not being explored in the mainstream.”
31 years! Why are you still doing this after so long?
I don’t have a choice! I can’t do anything else! Oldenburg is the biggest part of my life. When it happens, when everything comes together and we have that special Oldenburg atmosphere, then it’s something truly incredible. Like this music project, with [Belgian electronic pop duo] Pornographie Exclusive. The band is Jérôme Vandewattyne and Séverine Cayron. Jérôme is also a filmmaker and last year, his feature The Belgium Wave won Oldenburg’s Audacity award. He was so inspired by the vibe of the festival that we decided to collaborate on a film together, where 10 Oldenburg alumni directed 10 short films, each one inspired by one of the tracks of the new Pornographie Exclusive album. Each song is the soundtrack for the film and at the world premiere in Oldenburg, Pornographie Exclusive will perform the whole thing live during the screening. It’s an example of the kind of energy that can ignite in Oldenburg. We never have enough money, we’re always struggling with our budget and the resources we have but when the festival starts, the energy returns and I remember why I keep doing this to myself, year after year.
Tim Blake Nelson in Bang Bang
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
In all this time, you’ve kept true to your principles and have championed a certain kind of indie film, genre cinema with an arthouse touch. The new Tim Blake Nelson film, Bang Bang, where he plays an aging boxer, seems to exemplify this kind of ‘Oldenburg movie.’
Definitely. Tim Blake Nelson isn’t just an actor who does a job for money. He has the same passion that we have for independent cinema. He was our jury president in 2004 and people like him, the way he makes films, gives us the energy to carry on. The same goes for the director of Bang Bang, Vincent Grashaw. There are a few others that we have as world premieres, that have this same kind of Oldenburg spirit. There’s James, a Canadian movie [from director Max Train] which I think is the discovery of the year. I don’t know why Toronto didn’t jump on it. It’s a black-and-white movie but a real crowd pleaser. It feels like an early Coen Brothers movie. There’s Flieg Steil, a German film from Martina Schöne-Radunski and Lana Cooper. Martina is an actress who won the Seymour Cassel acting award in Oldenburg in 2013 for Kaptn Oskar from Tom Lass. She was a real Berlin brat back then and I think is still so today. This is her directorial debut, with Lana, and its pure Berlin underground. It’s a story of a female musician in a neo-Nazi rock band who begins to get into feminism and wants to introduce that to the band. Then there’s a left-wing boy who just wants to beat up Nazis and they meat and it becomes a sort of Romeo and Juliet story. But what I liked is it doesn’t serve up everything to the audience in easy good/bad, black/white categories. It’ll have its world premiere here and Martina said she wanted it Oldenburg to have it first.
$$$
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
And we have a lot of small indies, so-called “no budget” movies that are excellent. Like $$$ from it’s a super gritty New York film from director Jake Remington that tells a story about people who are addicted to horse racing. It was shot with amateurs using verité footage and is the best example of how to make a virtue out of necessity, to find a narrative form that would never happen in a big budget movie. Or the Italian film Tineret [from director Nicoló Ballante] which started out as a documentary about this Modolvian family living outside Rome and the son, who has dreams of becoming a star rapper. At one point, the film took another direction and became more like a narrative feature. It’s another example of how independent cinema can open up new areas, new ways of telling stories, not being explored in the mainstream.
Do you see Oldenburg’s role as giving these movies a platform, especially now when indie films are finding it harder and harder to get into theaters?
What I’m noticing now is that the gap is getting bigger. Productions that fit into certain structures, largely streaming platforms, have their place, and anything else in indie cinema has become ultra-low-budget. We have some films this year that I think are amazing but, budget-wise, they are way below that of a normal indie film. Back in the ’90s, indie cinema still had some contact with mainstream cinema, the budgets were bigger, and the indie films were screened in cinemas, but I don’t think that exists anymore. Where are the distribution channels for small films like this? I don’t know. There are also people who say that independent cinema moves in waves and all it needs is some spark to jump back into the mainstream. Maybe James is one of these cases. It’s black and white and super low budget but a real crowd pleaser. The hope is that there are places like Oldenburg where these films can be seen and maybe help them find a way. I always swing between hopelessness and the renewed energy I get when I see an amazing indie movie.
It does! It was made without state support, which is very rare in Germany, a real shining example or true independent cinema. Produced with Studio Babelsberg, [director] Florian Frerichs has made a movie that, from its look and style, its locations and acting, can stand alongside a big mainstream movie. It’s in English and has the great hook that it was adapted from the same book [Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle] that was the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, so can be pitched as “the remake” to Kubrik. I can’t imagine it won’t find a place in the international market somewhere.
Traumnovelle
Courtesy of Oldenburg Film Festival
Your also honoring German director Dominik Graf with a retrospective. Another figure that seems to embody German indie cinema.
Dominik Graf is someone who movies between genre and arthouse cinema. He’s a John Carpenter of Germany. His films The Cat (1988) and The Invincibles (1994) are masterpieces. He loves marginalized cinema, he loves marginalized characters. He’s a big fan of Oldenburg. Over the years, he’s sent us messages, letters and postcards, complementing us on our program. We just thought it was about time that he was recognized. He’s probably Germany’s best director that is barely known outside Germany.
In some ways, Oldenburg itself is like an indie movie. Every year you seem to have the same struggles, but every year you manage to make it work.
We keep going. It is the same every year, the same budgetary problems, the same battles. But one thing we do have is our independence. Maybe because we are outside the big cities, people don’t pay as much attention to us, they don’t try to tell us what to do.
