In the heart of Berlin's Mitte district, a couple lives together: a writer who spends his days sitting on the sofa, and a young woman with a desire for freedom who can't stand the father of her child any longer and decides to go out at night to explore the city. Premiered in 2004 in the Official Section of the Berlin Film Festival, Romuald Karmakar's film, winner of the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Festival for Manila (2000), adapts the play Nightsongs by the Norwegian Jon Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023. Anne Ratte-Polle and Frank Giering, star of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, bring to life this young, nameless couple who hide, in their apparent everyday situation, a cultural sense of identity crisis shared by an entire German generation, into which Karmakar delves by filming the detour, her wandering through the night-time streets looking for something to hold on to outside of marriage.
Romuald Karmakar
Born in Wiesbaden in 1965, he shot his first feature film, ‘Eine Freundschaft in Deutschland’, in Super 8 at the age of 20. In 1995, his film ‘The Deathmaker’ won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his lead performer, Götz George. He won the Adolf Grimme Prize for ‘The Himmler Project’ (2000), and that same year he bagged the Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for ‘Manila’. In 2004, he competed at the Berlin Film Festival with ‘Nightsongs’, and a year later he received a special mention at Locarno for his musical documentary ‘Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea’. In 2009 he competed at the Venice Film Festival with ‘Villalobos’ and returned to the Lido in 2011 with ‘The Flock of the Lord’. In 2017 he directed ‘I Think of Germany at Night’, nominated for two German Critics’ Awards, and his latest feature film is the documentary ‘Der unsichtbare Zoo’ (2024), about the Zurich Zoo.
![Logo Foro Cultural de Austria Madrid[1]](https://www.seminci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Logo-Foro-Cultural-de-Austria-Madrid1-300x76.jpg){kind=logo}
