Dear Mr. Jung, dear Mr. Hartmann, dear Sascha Keilholz, dear members of the jury, ladies and gentlemen,
It is one of the greatest pleasures for me to be here with you today, because I am always deeply impressed – again and again – by the diversity and the commitment that define the Mannheim Heidelberg Festival program.
And of course, I am especially grateful for the opportunity to come together within a church context, on the margins of the festival, year after year.
I believe that a festival such as this one in Mannheim and Heidelberg will become increasingly important—especially in times of streaming. Because in an age when more and more people simply watch films on the sofa, on their laptops, or even on their phones, there is also a growing longing to be in a room together with others, to share the experience of watching a film collectively—to feel similar yet different, personal and intimate emotions, and, when the lights come back on, to look into one another’s faces and say: We just experienced something together. Perhaps even something we suffered through together, but it was a shared experience—we met people together, and we heard a story together.
I believe that this kind of experience will become ever more essential and valuable. And I also believe that the desire for other kinds of stories—stories you won´t find among the hundreds on Netflix—I believe that this desire is strong and will continue to grow. I am deeply thankful to the festival when I look at this year’s program, because here, the voices are heard that are too rarely present—too rarely listened to. The stories of marginalized people, of people on the edges, of those who are oppressed.
A film like Peter Hujar’s Day is a wonderful example of this: a very special biopic by Ira Sachs, with a sensational Ben Whishaw in the leading role, about photographer Peter Hujar, who was well known in New York’s cultural scene in the 1970s and 80s, yet never received the public recognition he deserved because of his homosexuality. That he is being brought back into the light is a wonderful thing. Other examples for me include The President’s Cake, about a little girl who has to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday., and Jahia’s Summer, which tells the story of a young woman from Burkina Faso who hopes to be accepted and to stay in her new home in Belgium.
And I also see a series of films about women and their struggles—films that reach back to the 1940s and 50s, often in the disguise of a melodrama, such as Mildred Pierce or the masterpieces of Douglas Sirk. In these so-called “women’s pictures,” we can see what preoccupied women and still does—and I think it may have had a stronger presence and was more clearly presented back then than even in today’s mainstream blockbuster cinema.
And this connects closely with whatwe do in church film work. In almost all areas of our work, we too strive to amplify the voices that are otherwise less often heard. In epd Film, for example, we publish articles about aspects of the film world that hardly appear elsewhere—apart from, of course, Filmdienst, our catholic counterpart. Through agencies such as the Protestant Center for Development-Related Film Work, in cooperation with Brot für die Welt, we work to bring films from the Global South—many of which have been shown at festivals—into educational work in Germany. Films such as Shambhala from Nepal or Cu Li Never Cries from Vietnam, both of which were shown in Berlin.
We also advocate for films like Sorry, Baby and Hamnet, which will be released in the coming weeks. These two films are very different. Sorry, Baby tells, in a very personal and challenging way, about the process of coming to terms with a sexual assault. Hamnet depicts how William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway as his wife cope with the death of their child, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell. Sorry, Baby is an independent production, while Hamnet is co-produced by Steven Spielberg, among others. But both films tell their stories from a distinctly female perspective, from a place of female pain—and that makes them both powerful and defiant, in a time that, in my opinion, is increasingly marked by a new kind of hardness.
But church film work depends on partners—and especially on collaboration with festivals. That is why the focus I see in this year’s Mannheim and Heidelberg program reflects a concern that we also care deeply about.
We all know we are living in politically turbulent times, and we know that films cannot always provide answers to our problems. Yet these two things are vital—for the future of festivals, for church film activities, and perhaps even for cinema as a whole, aside from the blockbusters that earn one to four billion dollars.
First, we must create opportunities for shared experiences—moments that make us think, that move us, that we can talk about, and that stay with us beyond the screening.
And second, we must draw attention to the stories of people who receive too little attention.
As always, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the festival here in Mannheim and Heidelberg for the loving and thoughtful curation of this incredibly rich and diverse program. I am always impressed by the combination of exciting films from both the past and the present. For, as Peter Bogdanovich once said: “There are no old movies, only movies you have already seen and ones you haven’t.”
Thank you very much, and I wish all of us meaningful encounters here—and a wonderful festival.
Christian Engels is head of EZEF (Protestant Centre for Development-Related Film Work), of Film Culture Work at the GEP (Association for Protestant Media Communication) and representative of the Protestant church for Pro7, Sat.1 and RTL television stations.