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Robert Thalheim • Director

Political, witty, human

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“There is good German humour and there is German humour that is awful. But the image of the totally inhibited German with no humour at all is quite wrong.” You have to talk about humour with Robert Thalheim, because the characteristic that makes him stand out most among his colleagues is his sense of humour. Thalheim is currently making his third feature film, and it is sure to be as witty as the others. But Thalheim, who has already won many prizes already and has been invited to the acclaimed Cannes Film Festival, is still relatively unknown in German cinema.

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During his school days, Thalheim already knew that he wanted to go to film school. “I didn’t know anyone who made money out of art. Once, as a kid, I was allowed to hold my father’s Super 8 camera,” he says, now amused at the memory, also remembering an open house day at Studio Babelsberg. “On that occasion, an older man gave us some rather professional advice: ‘First, go out into the world and learn something’ – and in a way, I took that seriously.”

So he gained experience first: his alternative to military service in Auschwitz; a development aid project for a conservation organization in Indonesia; and then cultural science studies in Berlin, during which time he also published a book about Andrej Wajda together with a historian. “I did so many things with great enthusiasm. An awful lot come together, which helped me when I got to the film academy,” he says.

In his third year at the film academy in Potsdam, on a budget of only €4,500, Thalheim made his first film, Netto, which brought a number of prizes. It is a father-son story that also tells us a little bit about the losers after the radical political change in Germany in 1989. Made without a fixed screenplay over only 12 shooting days, it was a bitter, quiet, well-observed film; a comedy that always teetered on the brink of tragedy. And it already had the most important thing of all: its own recognizable signature.

Along with Andreas Dresen and some other students at Berlin film academies, Thalheim stood for cinema that was not terribly stylized in formal terms, but spontaneous and fleet of foot – its content not West but East German, interested in the ordinary people and thus far away from the stylization and formal exaggeration of Oskar Roehler, for example. However, it also represented a clear contrast to the now famous Berlin School (Christian Petzold, Valeska Grisebach, Benjamin Heisenberg, Koehler, and so forth) shaped by the experiences of the educated, West German middle classes.

Thalheim sought out a pretty difficult challenge with his second film, And Along Come Tourists [+see also:
trailer
interview: Alexander Fehling
film profile
]
, about a young man completing his alternative to military service in contemporary Auschwitz. The most astonishing thing about this film is the way in which the director manages to keep a basically light-hearted tone, despite the setting and a background history that would wipe the smile from anyone’s face. Here, once again he found a lightness of narrative that freed the story from its many weighty and depressing elements, flavouring it with a healthy portion of sarcasm.

Thalheim’s new film is about twin girls who travel to Hungary on their holidays in 1988 and fall in love with two boys from the West. “It’s a summer film, but an awful lot happens in those few weeks. In the end, the symbiotic sisters split up,” he divulges. It’s a true story and an image of the two Germanys, as well as the two sides of East Germany. “Of course, it is terrifically charged, in so many ways, but I try to get away from that.”

Shortly before shooting began, he had to re-cast the leading roles, as one of the actresses became pregnant. That reminded him of his second film: only a week before they were due to begin shooting, a ban on filming in the concentration camp was issued. It is only possible to survive such experiences with humour: “The humour that I really like is humour that makes you laugh about yourself, enabling you to let go and create ironic distance from yourself.” We will go on laughing with Robert Thalheim.

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