Berlin International Film Festival revealed the first six films selected for Perspektive Deutsches Kino 2019. And this time everything revolves around love: love of another person, love of a special place, love of the cinema, love of one’s faith, and love of life.

“The different ways in which love plays out provide a powerful portrait of the current generation of 25 to 45-year-olds,” remarks section head Linda Söffker. “The filmmakers and their characters are creative, egocentric, and hedonistic — they live in the tension created by a love of adventure and self-realization, on the one hand, and the desire for trust and security, on the other.”

Perspektive Deutsches Kino 2019 will open with the documentary film easy love by Tamer Jandali, who accompanied seven young women and men with the camera in Cologne for four months. The protagonists are not professional actors, and it is their personal situations and attitudes toward love that is the starting point for the film’s plot. Thus, the director aptly prefaces the opening credits with the words: “No Actors, No Scripts, No Fake Emotions”.

Oray, a fiction film that also originated in Cologne, tells of Oray (Zejhun Demirov), a Muslim man who is torn between his love of his beliefs and his belief in love. In a quarrel with his wife Burcu (Deniz Orta), Oray utters “talaq”, the Islamic formula for renouncing marriage, and as a consequence is called upon to divorce his wife. Having been raised by religious parents himself, director Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay explores — in what is his graduation film for the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM)­ — the boundaries between self-sacrifice and the possibility of deviating from the laws of Islam. For his performance as Oray, Zejhun Demirov recently won the FIRST STEPS Award in the Götz George Young Talent category.

The fiction film Die Einzelteile der Liebe (The Components of Love) by director Miriam Bliese was made as her graduation film for the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb), and oscillates between love, separation, and heartache. Sophie (Birte Schnöink) and Georg (Ole Lagerpusch) once loved each other, but now they have split up. Almost the entire film takes place in front of the same doorway in Berlin. In an elliptical way, the individual scenes of Die Einzelteile der Liebeportray a family for whom the word patchwork is the new normal — and take a laconic look at the everyday irrationalities of love.

The 43-minute fiction film Off Season by Henning Beckhoff describes the state of a couple in the off season, shortly before the birth of their child. Gregor (Godehard Giese) surprises his girlfriend Judith (Franziska Petri) with a wellness holiday in Sicily, but Judith would rather go to work than lie on the beach. Her boyfriend’s expectations with regard to the baby and his eagerness for family life create an ever-greater distance between the two.

The documentary Die Grube (The Pit) revolves around a mineral water pool in director Hristiana Raykova’s hometown of Varna in Bulgaria. Situated right by the sea, this thermal pool is lovingly called “the pit” by local residents. Sitting in the hot water, they lean back up against the pool’s edge and philosophize about their lives. Here personal and political convictions collide, and tell of both social change and stagnation at the periphery of Europe.  

Katja and Julius Feldmeier’s documentary interview film 6Minuten66 (6Minutes66) has been invited to participate as a guest in Perspektive Deutsches Kino. In the film, 15 directors (Dietrich Brüggemann, Nikias Chryssos, Katrin Gebbe, Helene Hegemann, Sonja Heiss, Cüneyt Kaya, Laura Lackmann, Jakob Lass, Tom Lass, Burhan Qurbani, Axel Ranisch, Christian Schwochow, Mia Spengler, Thomas Stuber, Tini Tüllmann) explore the question of whether the cinema is dying out as a location, an art form, and language. Their responses will also be taken as an occasion to discuss these issues at a “Reden über Film” (“Talking about Film”) panel in the Audi Berlinale Lounge.

Perspektive Deutsches Kino 2019

easy love
by Tamer Jandali
with Stella Vivien Dhingra, Sophia Seidenfaden, Sönke Andersen, Lenika Lukas
Feature film
World premiere

Die Einzelteile der Liebe (The Components of Love)
by Miriam Bliese
with Birte Schnöink, Ole Lagerpusch, Andreas Döhler, Justus Fischer
Feature film
World premiere

Die Grube (The Pit)
by Hristiana Raykova
Documentary
World premiere

Off Season
by Henning Beckhoff
with Franziska Petri, Godehard Giese
Medium-long feature film 
World premiere

Oray
by Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay
with Zejhun Demirov, Deniz Orta, Cem Göktaş, Ferhat Keskin, Mikael Bajrami
Feature film
World premiere

Guest of the Perspektive:

6Minuten66 (6Minutes66)
by Katja Feldmeier and Julius Feldmeier
Documentary
World premiere