Portland German Film Festival - Monthly Film Series

In our Monthly Film Series, we will show a variety of GERMAN or GERMAN language films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. On the 2nd Wednesday of each month, audiences will now have a chance to see these films on a regular basis at the CLINTON STREET THEATER. (Children movies will be playing on Sunday afternoons – please check our website.) All films are in German with English subtitles.

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook and get reminders for our monthly movie series and the Portland German Film Festival. You can contact the PGFF here.

Bornholmer Street (Bornholmer Straße)

WED. Jan. 9, 2019 – 7:00 PM

Director: Christian Schwochow, colour, 88 min., 2014

Cast: Charly Hübner, Milan Peschel, Rainer Bock, Max Hopp, Ludwig Trepte, Ulrich Matthes, Frederick Lau

9 November, 1989: At the Bornholmer Straße border checkpoint in Berlin, GDR soldiers and customs officers are shocked by an announcement made by Günter Schabowski, member of the Central Committee of the Politburo of the SED, as he reveals in a press conference, broadcast live on television, that all East German citizens will be allowed to cross into the West. Many people are caught up in the euphoria – and not realising that they still require a passport and visa, head straight to their nearest checkpoint. Lieutenant Colonel Schäfer and his men still haven’t realised what will be in store for them later that evening. It ends with the border being opened – the beginning of the end for the GDR. BORNHOLMER STRASSE is a magnificently ironic and astonishingly moving comedy about hope meeting despair and heroes who have no desire to be such.

Details

If Not Us, Who? (Wer wenn nicht wir)

WED. Feb. 13, 2019 – 7:00 PM

Germany 2011, 124 min
Director: Andres Veiel
Cast: August Diehl, Lena Lauzemis, Alexander Fehling

There will be an introduction by Prof. Carrie Collenberg Gonzalez, Ph.D. from Portland State University.

West Germany in the early 1960s. The country is quiet – for the time being. Bernward Vesper takes up his studies in Tübingen where he is attending Walter Jens’ seminar on rhetoric. Bernward wants to be a writer and spends his nights bashing the keys of a typewriter. At the same time he is keen to defend his father, the poet Will Vesper who was celebrated by the Nazis as a proponent of their ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology. The land where Bernward lives is being suffocated by its past. The war has only been over for fifteen years, old Nazis are back in positions of power, and nobody is prepared to talk about war crimes; the Republic is standing to attention.

Details