As part of Wunderbar Together: Year of German-American Friendship, Goethe Pop Up Kansas City invites everyone to discover contemporary German cinema. Each film will be shown in German with English subtitles.

Join us as we commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall with a screening of Andreas Dresen’s biopic Gundermann – the big winner at this year’s German Film Awards, where it took home six Lolas at the weekend’s gala in Berlin after receiving a record 10 nominations. Recently, director Andreas Dresen toured with the film in the U.S.; in San Francisco he received the Career Achievement Award at the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival - the largest festival of contemporary German cinema in the Americas.

Gundermann

Germany 2018, 127 min
Director: Andreas Dresen
Cast: Alexander Scheer, Anna Unterberger, Eva Weißenborn

Gundermann tells the tale of a coal-digger who writes songs. A poet, a clown, and an idealist, he dreams and hopes and loves and fights. He is a family man, a rebel, a spy, spied-upon, a threat to the state. A do-gooder who doesn’t know any better. He is all of these things at once. Gundermann is a film of love and music, a drama about guilt and entanglement, a story of repression and self-empowerment. It is a film of home, of a fresh look at a now-bygone country.

With remarkable tenderness, humor, and affection for his subject, filmmaker Andreas Dresen creates a touching and inspiring portrait of East German folk hero and singer-songwriter Gerhard Gundermann. The political and passionate Gundermann found success in music in 1986 while still working as a coal-digger; he entranced audiences with his humble presence and his profound lyrics - a rich mixture of social commentary, levity, and melancholy. This intractable, brave, and contradictory talent lived a complex life highlighted by sincerity and defiance. Der Spiegel called the film “one of the richest, most sophisticated, and greatest films about East Germany”.

Andreas Dresen is one of Germany’s most admired directors, with numerous diverse and award-winning feature films to his name. Born in 1963 in Gera, East Germany, he began working in theater and making short films in the early 1980s. He studied directing at the HFF “Konrad Wolf” Potsdam-Babelsberg. Since 1992, he has been working as a writer and director for film, TV, theater, and opera. His specific directing style is based on improvisation, which results in extraordinary acting accomplishments and a feeling of almost documentary-like realism.

Image © Peter Hartwig / Pandora Film