Berlinale diary: “24 weeks” – the most difficult of all decisions – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Since then, Dieter Kosslick Berlinale director, he has made every effort to heave German productions in competition. He has thereby often turned a blind eye, sometimes both. That was not the tormented spectators beautiful nor for ausgebuhten directors. Now Kosslick has the qualification level for German productions apparently lifted a piece. Lo and behold: The Erfurt-born director Anne Zohra Berrached comes with her drama “24 weeks” easy about it

Berrached tells of the successful cabaret artist Astrid Lorenz (Julia Jentsch), who with her. second child is pregnant and one day learns that it will come with a down syndrome born. How much the child will be disabled, doctors can not say. Until the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy Lorenz has the right to let an abortion. But Astrid and her friend Markus (Bjarne Mädel) decide that they want to have the child.

The question of whether one may abort embryos after a severe disability was diagnosed prenatally, is discussed very emotionally, especially in Germany. Let’s continue where the Nazis left off when she was murdered in racial mania people with disabilities? Let us raise ourselves on creation or when we do not believe in God over nature? Or is it not rather our moral duty to prevent that from embryos are people who expect an extremely sorrowful life?

With great confidence and strength to Berrached moved through this battle zone. In every scene of the film might hit the wrong tone, and he almost always hits the right. “24 weeks” is the opposite of Thesen- or theme film. He pulls the viewer into the conflict, in which the couple gets when it learns that her baby needs to be subjected immediately after the birth of a critical heart operation.

“24 weeks” is as gripping as moving film about one of the most difficult decisions that people have to make. In one scene, Astrid, Mark, and her nine year old daughter Nele learn some children and adults know who suffer from Down’s syndrome, all wonderful, lovable and apparently happy people. It would not give their parents would let them drive off.

Julia Jentsch leaves the viewer fear, collapsing under a superhuman burden, share more and more, the feeling of being caught in a dilemma, the is so deep that you may never come out of it again. Jentsch makes “24 weeks” a great film about a dilemma over the choice between two options, both of which can be heartbreaking one.

three acid tests in love

the crafty Dieter Kosslick has on Valentine’s Day, which sank in Berlin in the murky gray, programmed three films in competition, where it comes to love, to acid tests, where it is exposed to longings that it awakens , The Frenchman André Téchiné told in “Quand on a 17 ans” ( “17 years old”) by two young men who fall in love; Portugal’s Ivo M. Ferreira in “Cartas da Guerra” ( “Letters from the War”) by a soldier who sends his wife from the front letters home.

“Quand on a 17 ans” is a feverish staged and tremendously fast cut coming-of-age story set in a French mountain village. Two guys, Damien (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Tom (Corentin Fila), moving in the same class, the other is a one leg, one miwws. The request, which grows in the two, initially finds no other way out than fists.

Téchiné gives the audience the feeling of being there live such a love is born. There are no people in this film, of which Damien and Tom had something to worry about, is would profess two to their feelings. Rather, it is their own fears, doubts and uncertainties, have to fight through it. The two main characters make it an engaging blend of duel and duet.

“Cartas da Guerra” tells of how love can help to survive the war. Based on the text layer are the letters that wrote of its use in Angola War of Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes. As an army doctor he comes in 1971 after East Africa where the Portuguese colonial power fighting against guerrillas. In the 27 months that he has been stationed there, he wrote passionate letters to his pregnant wife waiting for him at home. Initially, the woman can still be seen in detail, fantastical scenes later, she is only present as the voice that reads Antonios letters. So it is getting further away, until a doubt come, if there really is this woman. The director Ferreira is about the power of imagination.

Todschöne black and white images, which usually show the monotony of war and only sometimes his brutality; to rapturous texts that deal with all-consuming desires – this unusual cinematic approach culminates in a wonderful sequence in which Antonio all beautiful things and feelings that he knows, compacted in a wild, minute-long declaration of love.

Unfortunately, the film exhausted after the ecstatic scene and recovers no more until the end. However, it is one of the few periods of weakness in a hitherto quite strong Berlinale Competition.

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