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TORONTO 2017 Discovery

The Garden: Family secrets

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- TORONTO 2017: Debut German filmmaker Sonja Maria Kröner makes her entrance with a psychological drama centred on a middle-class family in West Germany in 1976

The Garden: Family secrets
Thomas Loibl and Laura Tonke in The Garden

After claiming the German Cinema Awards for Best Director and Best Production at the Munich International Film Festival, German director Sonja Maria Kröner’s debut film has had its first international screening in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival . The Garden [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
is a family drama set in the summer of 1976 and unfolding entirely within the boundaries of a West German country house. Three generations converge on the mansion of their recently-deceased matriarch to pay their last respects. Like a portent of some approaching calamity, on the night before the funeral the oldest tree in the garden is struck by lightning and crashes to the ground. This minor incident, the result of a chance act of nature, sets off a chain of confessions and recriminations that will change the lives of everyone in this bourgeois clan.

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The sophisticated screenplay (also the work of the neophyte director) guides the conversations and passive-aggressive behaviour of the adults towards the final exposure of the fault lines that have scarred the familial sanctuary for decades. As in Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carla Simón
film profile
]
, the family tensions flow in a way that feels natural, without any histrionics or excessive drama, thanks to an excellent use of off-screen elements that allow the family’s past to be felt as an abiding presence in the story. This is despite the fact that the viewer is never granted full access to it, as Kröner declines to resort to facile revelation flashbacks.

The Garden is more than just an account of a discrete family drama; in fact, the film deftly splices together a number of parallel sub-plots about the many running feuds that harry the adults involved. While the grandchildren and great-grandchildren play in the woods or listen to radio news updates on the case of a missing girl, their parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents bicker among themselves in every corner of the great house, particularly brother and sister Gitti (Mavie Hörbiger) and Bernd (Thomas Loibl), along with Bernd’s wife Eva (Laura Tonke), until finally the truth begins to emerge.

The Garden is a co-production by Walker + Worm Film GmbH & Co. KGWDR Westdeutscher Rundfunk and BR Bayerischer Rundfunk. Beta Cinema is handling international sales.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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