The picture of the evening is larger than life Maria Schrader, as she first sits very still in a hotel room on the American east coast, behind her a wooden wall, in front of her a lonely yellow rose on the table. And then suddenly it bursts out of her, she fills the huge hall in the Palais am Funkturm with her infectious laugh – and sends a message of thanks from New York to Berlin. The director of “Ich bin dein Mensch” has just won the most important awards at the German Film Prize, best feature film, best director, best script with Jan Schomburg, best female leading actress with Maren Eggert; at the moment she is already making her next film, so she cannot be there live. In the strong enlargement, Schrader looks like an animated sculpture, the personified joy – which goes wonderfully with her visionary film, in which a scientist enters into a love affair with a robot man. “Now I’m really touched,” she says. “We have created spaces that are fear-free, there was a softness and delicacy that made this film possible. I would like to work that way all the time.”
Maria Schrader, larger than life: The picture of the evening.
(Photo: Soeren Stache / dpa)
The film industry had to wait a year and a half for moments like this, because of the pandemic there was only one streamed version of the German Film Award in 2020. It was a hard time, and for many an existentially threatening one, the President of the German Film Academy Ulrich Matthes reminds us in his welcoming speech. But now 1200 guests can again enter the hall, celebrating a comeback – the reopening of the cinemas. Daniel Donskoy leads through the evening as a singing and dancing moderator, his energy and vocal power are admirable, even if he is nervous at the beginning and some gags get lost in the shower of sparks. Don’t be bored: This Lola gala should tear the audience from the Corona sofas, everything should be bigger, faster, brighter and more colorful, also more diverse than usual; it seems as if someone in the control room has turned all the controls to the highest level.
“There is always a personal deficit.”
Ultimately, such an award ceremony lives from the moments of charming exaggeration and disinhibition, you need the right protagonists, keyword Rampensau. In this regard it has Oliver Masucci a lot to offer. The actor gets the Lola for the best male leading role – in Oskar Roehler’s film “Enfant Terrible” he plays the director-berserk Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a mercilessly excessive way. And Masucci, who after four nominations in the past few years can finally call the coveted trophy his own, pulls out mightily: as he had to see every film in the cinema as a child, always the one mark fifty entrance fee in his pocket as he did Reality completely traded in for the big screen stories. Actors, says Masucci, are driven: “There is always a personal deficit when you stand on stage and let others gawk at you – a healthy person doesn’t do that!”
Lola for best male lead: Oliver Masucci.
(Photo: Franziska Krug / Getty Images)
Thorsten Merten (best male supporting role in “Curveball”) posted a joyous success. Merten doesn’t care about the dress code and any form of correctness. Instead, he flirts with his East German identity: “If I’m supposed to play Deutsche Bank, the local savings bank always comes out, but that’s exactly what the director wanted.” In contrast to most of the award winners, Merten does not dutifully thank his wife and agent until the orchestra slowly starts the bouncer, but also the “working people of the German Democratic Republic for financing a free course of study.” After many appeals for more visibility, mindfulness and gender equality, this somehow has a liberating effect.
Lorna Ishema wins in the Best Supporting Role category.
(Photo: Britta Pedersen / dpa)
How diverse the biographies in German film have become can be seen in the acclaimed appearance of Lorna Ishema (best supporting role), who was born in Uganda and grew up in Hanover. In the film “Ivie wie Ivie” she plays an Afro-German who is called Schoko by her friends in Leipzig – a young woman in search of herself who finally wants to get out of the cliché trap. Actually, Lorna Ishema speaks for a lot of filmmakers on this evening, whether excellent or not: “I want my characters to be seen.”
With a knitted hat between the smocked straps
The evening was not quite as successful for Dominik Graf and his film “Fabian or The Walk to the Dogs”, which was previously a favorite with many members of the German Film Academy. After all, it is enough for the silver Lola, Maria Schrader’s entertaining drama between man and machine beats the harder, three-hour long Berlin city film about the 1920s. The favorite, “Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse”, prevails as the best documentary film: the portrait of a teacher who treats his students with openness, warmth and humor – and that too is a great moment, like this humble person with his knitted hat between the Tuxedo wearers stands out and finds the right words. Bachmann knows how to entertain an audience, he quotes his motto in life, a line from the singer Neil Young: “Teach your children well and feed them on your dreams.”
The highlight of the evening is the awarding of the honorary prize to Senta Berger. Her colleague and long-time stage partner Klaus Maria Brandauer steps out of the backdrop as a surprise guest and pays homage to the courageous, clever, beautiful and incorruptible Viennese who has lived in Munich for a long time. Brandauer indicates how much strength it must have cost the young Senta Berger to defend herself against attacks while filming with male film stars, including in Hollywood, “but she was able to defend herself, she did not allow anything that could have hurt her self-esteem”. Senta Berger became a world star with a social conscience and one of the most popular actresses in German-speaking countries. The prizewinner responds to the compliments with controlled self-irony, a declaration of love to the city of Berlin, where her career once began with producer Arthur Brauner, and heartfelt thanks to her husband Michael Verhoeven, with whom she has been married for 55 years: “Michael has protects me very often – also from myself. “
Above all, Lola 2021 shows one thing: German film has the self-confidence to win back the audience. Now the audience just has to reciprocate the big feelings.