This Tuesday evening the time has come: The 17th Five Lakes Film Festival (FSFF) will open. A total of 130 films will be screened at the festival. Celebrities arrive, the juries meet. More than seventy filmmakers will personally present their new works. Maria Schrader, Margarethe von Trotta and Ulrich Seidlan will come to Lake Starnberg as guests of honour. Paula Beer is awarded the Hannelore Elsner Prize. Frank Griebe receives the first FSFF camera award. Film talks and panel discussions will take place. And in the end, the visitors decide on the most beautiful film: At the closing ceremony next Wednesday in the Schlossberghalle, the one from the Süddeutsche Zeitung donated audience award.
Fifteen different entries are competing in the Best of Festivals category this year. The winning film gets an advertisement in the SZ worth 5,000 euros. Before each screening, cinema-goers receive a postcard that serves as a ballot. And anyone who not only rates their favorites with the top rating “very good” on the card, but also leaves their name and email address, also takes part in a raffle: the winner receives a free annual ticket for the wide-screen cinemas and a digital annual subscription to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Visitors can choose between very different feature films and documentaries. The film “America” by director Ofir Raul Graizer tells a story between Israel and the USA, between friendship and love, between life and death. Based on Mizukami Tsutomu’s autobiographical tale, Yuji Nakae’s film The Zen Diary is about modest and mindful living and cooking in Japan. The French production “The Simple Things” is a comedy about a successful entrepreneur and a reclusive mountain dweller. “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” is the film adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s bestseller, it is about grief and coming to terms with the past.
“Falling Leaves” is the name of the new film by award-winning Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. “L’amour du monde – longing for the world” is a contribution from Switzerland that begins in the boredom of a summer on Lake Geneva and has to do with wanderlust as well as with homesickness. “Last Dance” is also about, but by no means only, a dance show by the Spanish-Swiss choreographer La Ribot, who plays herself in the film. “Luise” by director Matthias Luthardt with Luise Aschenbrenner in the title role is a historical drama that begins in October 1918, shortly before the end of the First World War in Alsace. “Sophia, Death and I”, Charly Hübner’s directorial debut, is a road movie.
Senta Berger can be seen in “Do you remember”.
In “Stams” the most important winter sports school in the Alps, the ski boarding school in Stams, is presented. The film “Tchaikovsky’s Wife” portrays Russian aristocrat Antonina Miliukova, a young woman who could have anything she wants – but is obsessed with marrying composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Nishtha Jain directed the film “The Golden Thread” about the old jute mills in India which have remained virtually unchanged since the industrial revolution. A theatrical performance of Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” is the starting point for the comedy “The Lost King”. Günter Maria Halmer is an old married couple who have forgotten a lot, but not everything.