Die Zeit 07.12.2006

Chile's ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet is critically ill, there are even reports that he is on his death bed. Singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann nevertheless has no desire to make his peace with him. "This rotten old man Pinochet. Right to the last, even when standing trial before Chilean courts, he defended his putsch thirty years ago against the democratically elected left-liberal president Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile. And he brazenly shrugged off the years of massacring his own people saying that at the end of the day, this bloody terror had helped democracy to victory in Chile.... There's nothing more to say, except that it is demoralising that a uniformed miscreant like Pinochet can die peacefully of old age instead of at the gallows."

French philosopher Andre Glucksmann movingly remembers Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. "She said to me, what's at stake here isn't just the immeasurable suffering of the Chechens. What's at stake here is all of us, the Russians, and you in the West, who live in prosperity but are blind. This barbarity stripped of law and justice is a cancerous growth whose metastases – corruption, arbitrariness, brutality – have taken over Moscow, St. Petersburg and the abject Russian provinces, shut away behind closed doors."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 07.12.2006

Susan Vahabzadeh and Fritz Göttler talk with actress Franka Potente, whose first directorial effort "Der die Tollkirsche ausgräbt" (Deadly nightshade) - a 43 minute black and white silent movie set in 1918 - started in Germany last week. "The very first image I had, one that kept coming back like in a dream, was of a piece of fabric lying on the ground. You want to pick it up but you can't, because there's always more and more of it. To that was added a childhood memory: whenever I saw something glistening in the grass I always wanted to pick it up, because I thought it must be a chain or necklace or something like that. Mostly it was just a piece of bubble-gum wrapper that had caught the light. So there's this childish way of seeing something magic behind the most common things. Plus I was always interested in the Weimar Republic, the outbreak of frivolity, the machines they made back then, the start of the Roaring Twenties. And the transition from monarchy to democracy. All that came together, and it seemed easier to let my thoughts run free in this magical realm than in reality."


Frankfurter Rundschau 07.12.2006

Daniel Kothenschulte has seen a wonderful film: Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" with Isabella Rossellini. "In the year 1933, at the height of the depression, she plays a brewery heiress who, due an accident and her doctor's blundering, has lost both her legs. In Winnipeg, Canada, a city we are told has been voted the world's most desolate place four times in a row, she launches a music competition to find the saddest music in the world. Kazuo Ichiguro's compelling idea for the film says much about the concept of sponsoring: by finding the saddest music in the world, the brewery will also find the ultimate drinkers. The odds are in favour of a Serb whose song is written in memory of the nine million dead in the First World War and his wife who has disappeared. Heart-rending would be the wrong word, this is utter misery."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 07.12.2006

Paul Ingendaay is irate at the "complicity of the German diplomats in Havana in a flagrant case of censorship": The Cuban Film Institute has blacklisted the documentary "Havana – The New Art of Making Ruins" by Florian Borchmeyer and Matthias Hentschler, so that it cannot be shown at the Havana Film Festival. "You would have expected the Germans to file an official protest in reaction to this shameful case of censorship, and not just quietly go along with the Cuban authorities. But that's exactly what they did, and its on record. The directors and their uncomfortable film were dropped like a hot potato."