A Heimat film is a German movie staged in Heidi surroundings—simple dramas of good and evil in the beautiful countryside, made for people who had fled that countryside in the first place. Home From Home (Oct. 30 at 2:30pm at Camera 12 in San Jose) is one of five films on offer at the daylong South Bay leg of the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival. With some wit, director Sung-Hyung Cho describes her documentary as “a Heimat film,” although it is set on the other side of the globe. Korean nurses were recruited for long-term contracts in Germany. Some of them married German men and returned to their home country with retired husbands in tow, moving to the island of Namhae, where developers promoted a hallucinatory “German Village” with Alpine houses. The Germans failed to show up in droves. The few we meet here try to keep the side up, like expatriate Englishmen in California. It is the wives who open up both to the camera and to the director, who herself moved to Germany. And these elderly women tell of how they went overseas, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes leaving the children behind. Their quiet strength is contrasted to the sometimes (but not always) affectionate grousing of the old men, who may feel themselves too old to learn to speak Korean. We see them fussing about the surroundings (“Here’s a mailbox that’s been crooked for five years”), crabbing about the hills (“We live like mountain goats”) and enduring strange Buddhist rituals like getting whapped with bamboo canes.
On a similar subject of aging, the Swiss film Julia’s Disappearance (5pm) features Bruno Ganz (the man, the Downfall meme) in a comedy about a woman’s 50th birthday. The title’s joke is that a woman turns invisible upon that day. Rebelling against that fate, one Julia (Corinna Harfouch) runs away from her own birthday party. Once upon a time Germany produced the world’s most advanced films. Today it offers us (thanks to some American production money) Men in the City (9:30pm). Is it supposed to sound like Sex in the City? Yes, and that says it all. Soul Kitchen (7pm) is the long-awaited arrival of the newest by the always-worthwhile Fatih Akin. Perhaps least interesting of the five features on view: Rock Hudson: Dark and Handsome Stranger (12:30pm), a documentary about the movie star who hid his sexuality. Here are some interesting reminiscences, such as San Francisco’s Armistead Maupin talking about his tryst with Hudson at the Fairmont Hotel. But there is some tastelessness in treating Hudson’s death of AIDS as a species of celebrity meltdown, as seen in the showy edits made out of the static of changed TV channels and china-marker scrawled film leader.
Berlin & Beyond Film Festival
Saturday, Camera 12, San Jose
