Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot / Grave Decisions. Photo: Christian Hartmann / Roxy Film
The winners of the 2007 Bavarian Film Awards — the most important German film prize after the German Academy's Lolas — were announced yesterday at a gala ceremony in Munich.
The Porcelain Pierrot (worth €200,000) for best film — or best production — went to a local effort, Marcus H. Rosenmüller's feel-good dark comedy Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot / Grave Decisions (top photo). Spoken in one of the local Bavarian dialects, Rosenmüller's feature-film debut became a surprise hit in Germany, earning more than 10 million euros at the box office. Rosenmüller also took home the prize for best young director.
Wer früher stirbt, ist länger tot (literally, "Whoever dies earlier, will remain dead longer") follows an 11-year-old, Catholic Bavarian boy (Markus Krojer), who believes he's committed way too many sins to be allowed into heaven. He tries to patch things up with God by trying to seduce his teacher (Jule Ronstedt) and then by plotting to murder her husband. (I haven't seen the film, though it's been generally described as a Heimatfilm — the German equivalent to the Hollywood films set in the "Heartland" of the United States. Those are movies in which people are simple, honest, God-fearing, just a tad oddballish, and completely untrue to life.)
The Bavarian Film Awards' best director was Tom Tykwer for Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (above, with Ben Whishaw and Karoline Herfurth), the film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's highly successful and even more highly preposterous novel about a sniffing freak (Whishaw, up for a rising star BAFTA) who becomes fascinated with the body odor — or body scent, to be polite — of a beautiful young woman. Tykwer's English-language film version, by the way, has earned more than 50 million euros in Germany alone. (Where it's most probably been dubbed into German.)
Jürgen Vogel was chosen best actor for his performance as a man who discovers love while dying of cancer in Emma's Bliss, while veterans Monica Bleibtreu and Katharina Thalbach tied for the best actress prize for, respectively, Four Minutes and Strike.
In Chris Kraus' Four Minutes, Bleibtreu (above) plays a piano teacher who tries to reform a murderess (best new performer Hannah Herzsprung) by developing the young woman's musical talents, while Thalbach plays a semi-illiterate woman who becomes one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity movement in veteran Volker Schlöndorff's political drama.
Four Minutes, the top winner at the 2006 Shanghai Film Festival, won two other awards: best screenplay for Kraus, and the VGF Award for best new producers Meike and Alexandra Kordes.
Among the other winners were Joseph Vilsmaier and Dana Vávrová's The Last Train, about a cattle train filled with 688 Berlin Jews headed for Auschwitz, which received a special award; The Cloud, the story of a nuclear plant disaster, directed by Gregor Schnitzler and voted the best youth film; and Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler's Havana — The New Art of Building Ruins, which took the best documentary prize.
Thank you. That has been corrected.
The still from Tom Tykwer's "Perfume" (2006) shows Ben Whishaw and Karoline Herfurth (b.1984) and not as the caption states, Rachel Hurd-Wood.