Filmfest Dresden selected Love Tricycle for their international short film competition, and they offered to filmmakers free accommodation and travel money, so that was a good excuse to make my first trip to Germany.
The festival’s travel funds would only cover about a fifth of the cost of my flights, but luckily the Australian Film Commission also has some funding available for filmmakers to represent Australian films at some of the better festivals overseas, and their grant conveniently made up the difference.
I flew with Singapore Airlines to Singapore Changi Airport, then with Lufthansa to Dresden via Frankfurt. On the Singapore Airlines flight I felt strangely human for a piece of meat packed into a long metal tube. The service was great and the food was actually good. I had a few hours to kill in Singapore, but not really enough time to leave the airport, so I checked out all the airport had to offer, from the internal fishpond/garden, to an outdoor cactus garden and back to the usual overpriced shops. I wasn’t so impressed with the Lufthansa flight, and not only because it was long. The yellow in their colour scheme wasn’t quite enough to break through all the grey, the food was ordinary, the stewardesses surley, and the service minimal. And they didn’t have the personal video screens like the Singapore Airlines flight did so I couldn’t even pass time watching the latest PG Hollywood movies. Frankfurt airport confused the hell out of me! It’s lucky I had an hour and a half before the connecting flight to Dresden, because it took about that long to get my head around their signs and procedures. Everything worked out though, and I arrived on time in Dresden, where I was met by a driver from the film festival.
Filmfest Dresden puts a lot of effort into inviting filmmakers to attend their event, and supporting them while they’re there. We could ask to be driven around in the sponsored festival car, and they organised a few tours of Dresden throughout the week. I stayed at the Park Plaza Hotel, a few blocks from the festival venue, the Metropolis Cinema. The TV screen in my room greeted me in Deutsch as ‘Herr Goode’. Sehr gut, ja ja! After a quick power-sleep, I went to check out the cinema and meet the festival organisers. The interior walls are covered with huge paintings of themes from German film history. A cafe in the foyer served a very welcome espresso. On the other side of a small square behind the cinema is the Waldschlösschen Brauhaus which I ended up frequenting throughout the week with other filmmakers.
Not far from the Metropolis runs the river Elbe, which starts in the Czech Republic and cuts through Germany from south to north before ending in the North Sea. A few people were flying kites on the wide green river banks, but there weren’t too many other people around. I wish we had areas like these beside our Brisbane River! I returned to the hotel to get as much sleep as possible before the start of the festival the next day.
Urgh – I woke up with a cold. The air was extremely dry, in contrast to our humid Brisbane weather, and the air conditioning in the hotel didn’t help, but whether it was that, or a bug I caught on the plane, I’m not sure. The cold lasted all week, but luckily it didn’t come with anything worse like a fever, and it didn’t stop me from doing anything. I spent most of the first day watching competition films and meeting other filmmakers. The host of each session interviewed each filmmaker briefly before their film was screened, and invited questions from the audience. Love Tricycle got good reactions in all the right places, and it was great to be able to show the 35mm version – many festivals only screen video versions of short films.
The first tour we went on was around the old part of Dresden, which is famous for having the crap bombed out of it in World War II by the British and US air forces. While a few of the original buildings still lie in ruin, some have been completely rebuilt and others are still being restored. Patchworks of light and dark colour sandstone blocks give away the areas of restoration, where they’ve tried to preserve as much as possible of the original structures. It was great to see, first hand, so much grand, intricate and historical architecture. Gold-topped spires, statues, arches, carvings, murals and cobblestones are common features around this part of town.
At the edge of the tourist-heavy ‘old’ Dresden is the contrast of ’new’ Dresden, with a mixture of 70s-styled apartment and retail buildings and ultra-modern architecture like the slanted-glass walls of the new cinema. There’s not a lot of colour in this built environment, but that allows the occasional flower bed or mural to really stand out.
I ended up spending a lot of the week hanging around and having a great time with seven other filmmakers from different places: Evelyn from Belgium, Jake from England, Falk and Barbara from Berlin (who did a great job of translating everything for us!), Amit from India, Hisko from The Netherlands and Daniel from Spain. Evelyn and Hisko were there with their animated films, and the others with live-action films. The Waldschlösschen, being so close to the cinema, was our favourite haunt, where we tried many an ale from its microbrewery, and a German sausage or two.
Happily, the audiences were plentiful all week, and there was a full-house at the awards ceremony. Unfortunately they didn’t invite Herr Goode to the stage, but some prizes were services by German film companies, which I wouldn’t have been able to use anyway. From speaking with the other filmmakers, I learned that, because of the proximity of the European countries and the UK, it’s not uncommon for say, a British film to be shot in Spain and post-produced in Germany, which opens up a lot of production opportunities. It suddenly hit home just how isolated we are in Australia… as if my impending 36-hour return journey didn’t make that bloody obvious enough.
Before my return trip was a visit to a small village called Berlin. I had already booked my flight to leave from Berlin, and had planned to catch a train up there that day, but I ended up going the day before with Falk and Barbara who invited me to stay at their place that night. I was keen to check out Berlin, but my increasingly productive mucous glands and a bit of rain outside made staying in, sleeping, and trying to find just one good music video on German TV, the more attractive option. The taxi drove along beside the old Berlin Wall and through Checkpoint Charlie on the way home, but that was about the limit to my tour of Berlin. The sleep paid off though, and I felt a bit better for the long flight home the next day.
The Lufthansa flight back to Singapore was worse than the first one. I was seated in the very back row, where the seat-back can’t recline, so it was the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever been on. What a relief to arrive at Changi Airport again, and to discover a room with free automatic massage chairs, and other reclining lounges. I let one of those miraculous machines massage my back for about 30 minutes, then lay back and read and rested for another hour in total peace and quiet – what an awesome airport! The Singapore Airlines flight was great again, and of course, my cold cleared up a couple of days after getting home.
Here’s some photos from the trip:
