Ghosts (2005 film)
- Julia Hummer: Nina
- Sabine Timoteo: Toni
- Marianne Basler: Françoise
- Aurélien Recoing: Pierre
- Benno Fürmann: Oliver
- Anna Schudt: Kai
Ghosts is a German - French film directed by Christian Petzold from 2005 with Julia Hummer and Sabine Timoteo in the lead roles. The movie premiere was on 15 February 2005 in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival. The German theatrical release was on 15 September 2005.
Action
Shown are one day, one night and the following day in the life of a little orphaned girl Nina. Nina, a foster child, shy, introverted, lives only in the past that she is looking to work in their diaries. She meets Toni, a young woman who is currently living on the street and the exact opposite of it is: Just anxious to survive in the present.
They meet on Françoise, the touches aimlessly through Berlin. They, too, has been arrested in the past: do not give up hope to find her daughter, Marie, who was kidnapped here many years ago. For a moment she believes to recognize her daughter Nina. Her husband Pierre tries to persuade her to return to France with gentle patience.
When Nina Toni is left to sit after a party, she seeks to place on the disc where she met Françoise for the first time. She hopes to finally have a mother incarnate. Although Françoise is actually there, but their hope will be bitterly disappointed.
Form and content
The film is mainly form and not content. The events and characters are shown as means almost exchanged with any other. The focus of the film lies in its basic idea, the uprooted to show " Ghostly " the figures represented. His expression and the way it was made - fairy tales and sagas to combine dreams and reality - merge together to form a symbolic film work of art, with Petzold it deliberately avoids to psychologizing his characters (see the official website of the film and the press conference at the Berlinale ). He leaves behind " a permanent after-image " in the audience.
Highest importance is attached to the camera work. The film was shot in natural light, and there was also the use of the Steadicam, the viewer is similar to Gus Van Sant's Elephant not the silent observer of the film, but for a silent observer in the movie. However, for financial reasons, the director had still largely work with rails. The film remains to what he wants to show, at a distance. He feels a reduction obligation in which superimposed on the formal aspect of the emotional content. The camera runs the protagonists behind, looks them in action over the shoulders, is with them when they talk to each other - and if they lose again.
Locations
The film was shot in Berlin and Paris on 8 June 2004 to 21 July 2004.
Criticism
" In these caresses, in another of these caresses ghosts ' a great movie. On the whole he is not. So wonderful the soundtrack is so much she invites you to close your eyes and just listen to this film, so clear are the pictures, so wonderful Christian Petzold (as always dramatic advised by Harun Farocki ) his motives balanced against each other, so great the actresses are so little you can see the cinematic intelligence of this director: It does not work as a whole., Ghosts ' has the makings of a masterpiece, but it is not. "
" A study of grief, loneliness, and the futile search for closeness, in interfering with the narrative strands each other in their atmospheric density. Through the cool, distanced narrative style, the characters and their conflicts remain too lifeless. "
" With the typical almost for him melancholy director Christian Petzold [ ... ] again describes a problem -prone underdog story. However, without the looseness and self-evidence of French models the whole often looks very stiff and cramped. "
" Also, this Berlin is a ghost town. Petzold it moves quite still, as on tiptoe while watching his somnambulistic figures, but not even wake up. "
" Unstoppable the viewer into a story of longing and loss is pulled. The clear clarity of the Berlin summer, the rustling of the leaves and the wind, the hum of traffic, all of this is an experience second-order as if it were a dream, a memory or a story whose characters perhaps only by the desire of the other exist and are maintained in the world. Actually, in this photographed with almost hypnotic calm movie perhaps only the bottomless, all-pervading desire of a woman for her child. "
Awards
- 2005: Prize of the German Film Critics in the category " Best Feature Film "