German Film Festival in San Francisco

Angelika Recently, we had the opportunity once again to admire Götz George, Mario Adorf, Gudrun Landgrebe, and their peers here at one of our movie theaters. It was the German Film Festival, organized annually by the Goethe-Institut in San Francisco. The festival primarily showcases films by young German-speaking filmmakers. However, this year's closing film was by Helmut Dietl, who is, as we know, neither new nor unknown. It was set in an Italian restaurant in Munich, and of course, we couldn't miss it. Although the film didn't exactly blow us away, it was amusing to see a German film (with English subtitles) and the Munich scenery again. We noticed how many naked people were shown (Götz George, of course, had to show off his physique once again to prove how well he's maintained himself). The American woman next to me was quite taken aback (by the amount of nudity, not Götz George's physique). In American movies, such scenes are usually only subtly hinted at. This is where American prudery and strange double standards come into full play. After all, no one seems to mind that Bill Clinton's sex life is being publicly and as sensationally as possible discussed at the moment.

Here, Michael still needs to add something: In the movie theater, there was also a "typically German" attraction (at least that's what the American curators thought) - a fully blown pipe organ. An older gentleman with a helmet haircut played German melodies on it before the movie started. Otherwise, you felt like you were in Germany in that cinema: "People spoke German!" San Francisco is really teeming with this kind of people. And when Michael commented on the gentleman's hairstyle with "Wow, he looks like an old Nazi!", Angelika quickly silenced him.