22/06/2005

The 16th Marseille International Documentary Film Festival (FIDMARSEILLE), which will take place from the 1st to the 6th of July at La Criée, the National Theatre of Marseille, will screen 15 German documentaries, including The Irrational Remains (Der irrationale Rest) by Thorsten Trimpop, selected in international competition. This documentary produced by Credofilm (also in charge of international sales) and presented this year in the Forum section at Berlin, deals with the subject of the difficulty in resuming a relationship for three friends who haven't met since the Berlin wall fell.

Wie man sieht ('As you can see it'), by Harun Farocki (1986), a self-produced (in co-production with the Hamburger Filmbüro) and distributed anatomy of Germany, will be screened in the 'Thinking on Sight' sidebar. The FIDMARSEILLE is also organising a Werner Herzog retrospective which consists of ten films, including The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), My Best Friends – Klaus Kinski (1999), and Wings of Hope (1999).

This year, the festival also features, in collaboration with the French Film Days in Tuebingen, a section called 'Open Window on German Films' which will allows the public to discover national premieres, such as Alles was wir haben ('All we have'), a documentary in which Volko Kamensky views History as a fragmented space, Massacre (Massaker), a film by Monika Borgmann, Lokman Slim and Hermann Theissen on Sabra and Shatila, produced (and sold) by Lichtblick Film, in co-production with Dschoint Ventschr Filmproduktion, SF DRS (Switzerland), Umam Pro-duction (Lebanon) and Unlimited (France), as well as Did Wolff Von Amerongen Commit Bankruptcy Offences? (Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen?), a vision of the capital directed and produced by the Austrian filmmaker Gerhard Friedl with the German co-producer WDR. These films will compete for the First Film Award.

(Translated from French)