If David Lynch had decided to film Blue Velvet in Germany, Oldenburg would have been the perfect location. This sleepy little university town, with its cobbled streets, handsome churches and elegant wooden houses, already feels almost like a movie-set parody of picture-postcard Teutonic contentment. But every September, it also plays host to some of the darkest, weirdest, most experimental films on the planet. For better or worse, Oldenburg International Film Festival screens wild choices that would never play at other fests, trawling the cult fringes for buried treasure and flawed gems, a beacon of undiluted indie attitude in a sea of safer options.
Founded and run by Torsten Neumann, with hands-on help from his Canadian screen star partner Deborah Kara Unger (Crash, The Game, Silent Hill) and a team of eager young volunteers, Oldenburg has just wrapped up its 29th edition. Even after three decades, the “German Sundance” remains a DIY labour of love at heart, making resourceful use of its modest budget and local connections. This year the festival’s main hub was located in a former butcher’s shop, its serving counters still intact, the interior transformed into a kind of baroque lounge using antique furniture borrowed from the town’s main theatre. Neumann has spent the last week frantically multi-tasking as he pinballed between various cinemas, venues and bars, even taking on impromptu DJ duties at one the festival’s late-night parties.
But for all its home-spun feel, Oldenburg still maintains its unique voice as a platform for adventurous, outrageous, sometimes extreme cinema. As Neumann says, the festival “would always prefer a film that is maybe not perfect in its execution but dares to go somewhere that not the usual film would go.” That’s is certainly true of some of this year’s more unusual premieres, flawed but ambitious oddities like Juri Padel’s low-budget glitch-punk cyber-thriller Junk Space Berlin, or Stefanos Tai’s joyfully left-field We Don’t Dance For Nothing, which combines photo-montage stills with lively song-and-dance numbers to explore the struggles of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong.
The big discovery of this year’s festival was The Black Guelph by Irish actor-director John Connors, a powerful, panoramic, pan-generational crime thriller about the lingering social and psychological damage left behind by Ireland’s epidemic of child abuse in church-run schools. Winning both best film and best actor awards for its star Graham Earley, who heads a terrific ensemble cast, this emotionally charged world premiere was a coup for Oldenburg, as the film looks certain to make a bigger splash on the world stage.
Neumann describes Oldenburg’s progamming policy as an “open door” between genre cinema and art-house, with horror, sciene fiction and crime stories treated as valid forms rather than the guilty pleasures and afterthoughts they sometimes seem to be at other festivals. This inclusive approach threw up some fertile discoveries this year, like Mongolian director Baatar Basukh’s Aberrance, a twist-heavy shocker about a troubled couple whose restful mountain retreat becomes a bloody fight for survival, and Elli Foumbi’s Our Father, The Devil, which flirts with torture-porn as it tests the moral limitations of revenge. Brutal violence was a recurring theme across the program, from Parsley, Jose Maria Cabral’s period piece about a savagely racist massacre in the Dominican Republic, to Kazakh director Darkhan Tulegenov’s mercilessly bleak family drama Brothers. All these films won prizes or honorable mentions in Oldenburg.
In the short film selection, romantic relationships of various shapes provided the dramatic thrust for several stand-out competition entries. The winning short, Samuel Bereuther’s Jockstrap Jesus, centres on a gay couple with a sick child, in which one partner begins to suspect the other is purposely prolonging their daughter’s illness. In Rafael Martinez Calle’s Raw and Emilie Mannering’s Brasier, burgeoning taboo desires are the order of the day, with teenagers taking their first disquieting steps towards sexual maturity.
Among the festival’s retrospective tribute sections this year was the inspired familial pairing of directing duo Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, Outland) and his son John. Hyams Junior also screened his latest superior slasher Sick, still box-fresh from its Toronto world premiere. Scripted by Scream creator Kevin Williamson, Sick takes place during the first Covid wave of 2020, and cleverly milks black humour from the real life-or-death anxiety that came with the pandemic.
Speaking of Covid, this year’s Oldenburg screenings were thankfully free from the mandatory masks, social distancing and super-strict controls that dominated the Berlinale and other German festivals in recent years. But the virus still left its mark. A recent infection spike at the local high-security jail, the JVA, sadly forced cancellation of the “Knastkino” (prison cinema) program this year for the first time since it launched in 2005. Which is a shame, but this unusual makeshift venue will be back next year, when guests and visitors will once again be able watch films sitting next to actual convicted killers. Oldenburg is that kind of festival, a little further off the map than most, but worth the detour.
