Author Brigitta Wagner

The 74th Berlin International Film Festival could not have taken place on a more politicised stage. Not only did the festival reflect, as it typically does, the preoccupations of the world in the films selected...

Wolfgang Kohlhaase, a prolific German screenwriter from the former East, once told me that cinematic realism was to him like the view out the kitchen window of one’s childhood home. What struck me at the time w...

In Corona’s third winter, it was hard to care about cinema as one should. The kind of cinema that requires one’s physical presence in theatres and at festivals. Gathering indoors with strangers has become a cha...

A million years ago, or what feels about that long, Berlin got away with one of the last major film festivals before Covid-19 halted not just life as we know it, but also the film industry’s long-established pr...

2019 was the year that the Berlin International Film Festival wanted us all to know that it takes gender parity seriously. Not only did the festival expand, in its 69th edition, the gender statistics it keeps o...

Despite the controversy surrounding Dieter Kosslick’s imminent departure after a long tenure as director of the Berlin International Film Festival and German filmmakers’ open letter last November calling for mo...

In order to understand what the collaborative filmmaking couple Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groβ, known simply as Nana & Simon, do so beautifully in their new feature, Chemi Bedinieri Ojakhi (My Happy Fami...

There is something prescient about the films of Philip Scheffner. While news teams chase down the stories of the moment and documentary opportunists vie to be the first at the hot-topic buffet, Scheffner is the...

Feature image: Queen of Earth (dir. Alex Ross Perry, 2015) As a historian of German cinema, I used to cringe when people said, “German cinema? Oh, like Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog.” As if there were no othe...

Not all actors are filmmakers, and not all filmmakers can act. And certainly not all actor-filmmakers walk in slow motion in Times Square with cans of oil poised on their heads (in performance protest of the 20...

When can a filmmaker be said to have ‘a touch’? Ernst Lubitsch had a touch, but what exactly was this? A penchant for comic timing, for finding just the right way to stage a visual punch line or to tickle spect...

Often seen as the figurehead of the so-called “mumblecore” cineastes, Joe Swanberg discusses the aesthetic and technological practices that inform this indie phenomenon.

4-11 October 2008 Pordenone, Italy: A student of mine recently referred to silent films as “movies without speaking”. When I screened two silents in two consecutive weeks, his classmates groaned, “Anothe...