By Chesney Hearst, Senior Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Beginning Tuesday May 12th and continuing through Sunday, May 24th, Caixa Cultural in Centro will host the Achtung Berlin film festival. Celebrating filmmaking in the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region of Germany, the festival will feature free screenings of fifteen films making their debut in Brazil and will include two lectures featuring the curators of the festival, Hajo Schäfer and Sebastian Brose.
Every year more than 300 films are produced in the area of Berlin/Brandenburg, a region that has undergone many transformations during recent decades including the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a wall that separated the city for nearly thirty years. Through its featured films, the festival attempts to offer different and personal viewpoints of the area.
Co-produced by the Goethe-Institut and the Achtung Berlin Festival, the upcoming screenings and lectures at Caixa Cultural are sponsored by Caixa Econômica Federal and the Brazilian Federal Government.
The fifteen films that will screen at Caixa Cultural were produced within the last five years and include thirteen feature films and two documentaries, all set in the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region.
Highlights of the festival include “B-Movie: Lust und Sound in West-Berlin,” a documentary by Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck, and Heiko Lange that chronicles Belin’s vibrant underground music and arts scene in the 1980s; Jan Ole Gerster’s 2012 film, “Oh Boy,” about a drifting college dropout; Christian Schwochow’s 2011 film “Die Unsichtbare” (The Invisible) about a self-conscious acting student and Edward Berger’s “Jack,” a social-realist drama from 2014 about a ten-year-old boy with an unstable home life.
The festival’s two lectures will take place on the 16th and 23rd. The first will feature festival curator Sebastian Brose speaking about Berlin/Brandenburg and film production in the region and the second will have curator Hajo Schäfer recounting Berlin’s changing identity since the fall of the wall.
For more information about the festival and screening times, see the Caixa Cultural website and their Facebook page.
What: Achtung Berlin Film Festival
When: May 12th through May 24th, various screening times.
Where: Caixa Cultural, Av. Alm. Barroso 25, Centro.
Entrance: FREE