The Munich Film Festival, which runs June 27-July 5, will kick off with the German premiere of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet,” and close with “I Origins” from U.S. helmer Mike Cahill.
The festival features four sections — CineMasters, CineVision, Spotlight and International Independents — packed with German premieres.
“This year’s films hit their targets — they go straight to the heart or the solar plexus,” said festival director Diana Iljine in a statement.
Films making their Teutonic preems include Wim Wenders’ “The Salt of the Earth,” Tommy Lee Jones’ Western “The Homesman” and Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin” with Scarlett Johansson. Sky Italia’s high-profile TV series “Gomorrah” will also unspool at the festival.
The CineMasters entries will compete for the Arri/Osram Award. The lineup includes Turkish director Tayfun Pirselimoglu’s “I am Not Him,” Olivier Assayas’ “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental 3D film “Goodbye to Language” and the Dardenne brothers’ “Two Days, One Night” with Marion Cotillard.
Also in the lineup: Naomi Kawase’ “Still the Water,” David Gordon Green’s “Joe” and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan.”
In the CineVision competition, “The Wonders” by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, unspools along with “Beneath the Harvest Sky,” “Ruin,” “White Shadow” and “Young Ones.”
The Spotlight section lineup includes Susan Sarandon in “Ping Pong Summer,” Christoph Waltz and Tilda Swinton in Terry Gilliam’s “The Zero Theorem,” Sophie Marceau and Francois Cluzet in “Quantum Love,” James Franco and Val Kilmer in “Palo Alto” and Irrfan Khan in “Qissa.”
Jon Favreau’s culinary comedy hit “Chef” also screens in the section alongside French comedy “Playing Dead,” werewolf thriller “When Animals Dream” and “Hard to Be a God,” in which a group of scientists land on a planet similar to Earth but it’s still in Mmiddle Ages. After working on the film for 12 years, Russian director Aleksey German died in 2013. His wife Svetlana Kamalita completed it.
Germany’s largest summer film festival unspools 158 new films from 51 countries. The Retrospective this year honors director Walter Hill with a complete retrospective.
