The 31st Oldenburg Film Festival rolls out the red carpet

.

VERDICT: Germany's premiere indie film festival returns

The 31st edition of the Oldenburg Film Festival gets underway on 11 September.

For more than three decades, the small city in Lower Saxony has played host to the dynamic festival that aims to give indie films that same sort of platform as Sundance. Across the course of five days, the people of Oldenburg and the festival’s array of international guests will have the opportunity to celebrate a variety of bold and innovative filmmaking.

The festival will open on the evening of Wednesday 11 September with the world premiere of Florian Frerichs’ Traumnovelle which adapts Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella of the same name. At least the third adaptation of Schnitzler’s work – after the 1969 German TV movie by Wolfgang Gluck and Stanley Kubrick’s significantly more high-profile Eyes Wide Shut (1999) – this one purportedly hews closer the original source material. Repressed longings come to the fore when a man discovers his wife has been fantasising about someone else, sending him on a erotic voyage into the Berlin night. The opening screening has already proved popular enough that the Cinemaxx venue where it is being held have extended the performance to a second auditorium.

And audiences will have a lot more enjoy after that. Over the following four days more than 50 films, a combination of feature-length and shorts, will screen in venues around the historic old town and beyond. 18 different countries are represented in the programme which, as you would expect, boasts a strong German contingent. Alexander Dierbach’s Born Bad (Bose Gerboran) follows two detectives as they try to unravel the case of a murdered animal rights activist, killed by an unknown sniper deep in the forest. At the End of Truth, directed by Saralisa Volm, explores the impact of domestic violence on a successful surgeon. One of the festival’s gala screenings, the city’s state theatre will be lit up by Jerome Vandewattyne’s One-Way Ticket to the Other Side, which promises to immersive audiences in a spectacular moving image and live music event.

Alongside the offerings from Germany are films from across the globe, from Japan (A Wasted Night) to Columbia (Mi Bestia), from the UAE (Three) to Italy (Tineret). Sticking with Oldenburg’s ethos of championing indie cinema and forging its own path, this is not a line-up consisting solely of films from Cannes and Venice, but one in which audiences can genuinely make new discoveries. In addition, the festival welcomes two artists in exile from Myanmar to present work in their ‘Tribute’ strand, celebrating the films of Na Gyi and Paing Phyoe Thu. The section will screen two of Na Gyi’s features – 2019’s Mi and 2021’s What Happened to the Wolf? – as well as three shorts; Guilt, Our Turn and My Lost Nation.

In a similar vein, Oldenburg’s Retrospective strand celebrates the work of a single filmmaker, this time that of Dominik Graf. Renowned as a premiere purveyor of genre cinema for German audiences, and admired for the way his body of work surveys contemporary German society, this is a much needed focus that includes screenings of his films such as Die Katze (1988), Hotte Im Paradies (2002) and Fabian und Der Gang vor die Hunde (2021) amongst others, as well as a masterclass hosted by critic Rudiger Suchsland.

Beyond the physical streets of Oldenburg, this year’s edition will also continue the festival’s journey into the Metaverse. For its 30th anniversary last year, Oldenburg teamed up with MILC to craft a digital version of the old town where people could watch trailers or screen selected films from the festival’s streaming service The Platform, and this is set to continue in 2024. The move provides ever more ways for audiences to be wowed by the Oldenburg programme once again.

Read more of our coverage of the 2024 Oldenburg Film Festival