A lonely sailing boat glides over the evening blue water, the crescent moon hangs in the sky as if ordered, in the distance the chain of the Alps stands in rank and file. Now it would be nice if the star guest could look a little more cheerful for the pictures. “Laughter costs extra,” says Sandra Hüller dryly. In fact, she tries a little right away, but soon gives up. Of course, Sandra Hüller laughs when she feels like it, and not because the throng of photographers who have built up on the small peninsula of the seaside resort want it that way.
The completely unpretentious appearance of the actress in Starnberg in front of a good 200 film festival visitors is comparatively short, and that has its advantages. The lengthy question-and-answer game that Matthias Helwig, director of the Fünfseen Festival, usually conducts on stage with the Hannelore Elsner Prize winners, is omitted this time. Perhaps also because the subsequent comedy “Toni Erdmann” with Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller lasts 162 minutes. Presenter Katja Engelhardt from BR only asks a few fan questions, as she says. And the laudatory speech by director Annika Pinske (“Everyone is talking about the weather”) also gets to the point quickly. She praises the 44-year-old from Suhl for her sincere and truthful play without showmanship. Whether Hüller is playing Hamlet on stage, Rita in “Madonnen” or the career woman Ines in “Toni Erdmann” – all her characters “carry a radical secret and yet are very approachable and almost force you to be in a relationship with them to step”. And Hüller never tries to conform to a specific image.
Annika Pinske also has a nice story ready: She tells that she once took a photo of Hüller’s wintry balcony with lots of snow-covered prices. She was irritated and at the same time fascinated that the actress, who had been showered with awards, was throwing the trophies in front of the door.
Excellent: Hannelore Elsner Prize winner Sandra Hüller with festival director Matthias Helwig.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
Huller herself, the fourth winner of the acting prize endowed with 5,000 euros and donated by the Rotary Club Starnberg, hardly talks about herself, except perhaps that she is “a little overwhelmed”. She mainly talks about a ten-minute encounter with Hannelore Elsner (1942 to 2019) in the theater. At that time she could feel the fearlessness of the character actress, “which one has to fight for oneself again and again”. She is a “big fan of her work” and found it encouraging to see the development Hannelore Elsner took and the experiments she dared to undertake in later years. When asked by Katja Engelhardt what she would like to see from the film industry, Sandra Hüller pleads for more sustainable production and for simple stories that should be shot where they are created. Above all, she has one wish for the audience, she says: “that it comes more often” and that the cinema surprises them.