THIS year’s German Film Festival has a great collection of new releases and classics like the director’s cut of Das Boot.
The joint winner of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, the highly acclaimed Sound of Falling is a breathtaking and lyrical drama from visionary director Mascha Schilinski.
Over the course of a century, four adolescent girls from different time periods, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka, each spend their youth on the same farm in northern Germany, alongside the river Elbe between Berlin and Hamburg.
• (top to bottom) Lap 22, I’m Not Stiller, Das Boot and The Holy Grill are showing at The German Film Festival in Fremantle and Perth.
As the farmhouse evolves over the tumultuous 20th century, echoes of the past and generations of secrets linger in its weathered walls. Though separated by time, resonances between the girls’ lives soon emerge.
Experiencing parallel desires, lost innocence, loneliness and secrets, the lives of the four girls begin to intertwine and mirror each other while time appears to dissolve.
If you fancy something a bit lighter, then get stuck into a good old German snag.
James Larkin White (Albrecht Schuch) oder doch Anatol Stiller?
Adapted from the highly successful German stage play, The Holy Grill is a hilarious, irreverent and acerbically witty comedy directed by Marcus H. Rosenmüller (The Keeper) and featuring a brilliant ensemble cast led by Hape Kerkeling and Christoph Maria Herbst (A Family Dilemma).
At a routine general meeting of a tranquil, provincial tennis club, Heribert (Hape Kerkeling), long-time chairman of the club, and his ambitious deputy Matthias (Friedrich Mücke, Balloon) put forward a simple vote on the purchase of a barbeque grill for the next club party.
However, Melanie (Anja Knauer) unexpectedly ignites a cultural clash when she suggests buying a second grill for her doubles partner Erol (Fahri Yardim), the club’s only Turkish member, because devout Muslims cannot eat food cooked alongside pork.
A selection of films in this year’s Festival premiered at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival or ‘Berlinale’, including Prosecution, which won the Audience Award.
The film is an engrossing tale of good versus evil that cleverly combines legal drama and thriller for a powerful and urgent story about the realities of Germany’s judicial system.
With all the resources and authority of the state behind her, self-assured young German-Korean prosecutor Seyo Kim (Chen Emilie Yan) is determined to confront far-right violence in eastern Germany.
But when she becomes a target, surviving a racist attack, Seyo decides to investigate on her own, defying explicit orders from her superiors and putting her life further at risk. When she finally succeeds in bringing one of the attackers to trial, she fights to expose him as part of a wider right-wing network, digging deep into her office’s archives and weaving a tangled web of connections.
The new wave of German cinema is also well represented.
A highlight is 22 Laps, based on the bestselling novel by Caroline Wahl.
It’s a touching and tender coming-of-age drama about love, loss and the unbreakable bond between two sisters.
Tilda’s (Luna Wedler, The Forger, Biohackers) days are strictly regimented: studying mathematics, working at the supermarket, swimming, looking after her little sister Ida (Zoë Baier, also in Sound of Falling) and on bad days, her alcoholic mother too.
Together, they live in a small town that Tilda hates and which her friends have all left, moving to exciting places like Amsterdam or Berlin instead.
But Tilda remains to take responsibility for the family, looking after Ida, and earning money, yet only finding peace while swimming laps in the pool.
The Festival also features some movies from over the border in Austria.
Starring Albrecht Schuch (All Quiet on the Western Front), I’m Not Stiller is a psychological mystery about a man accused of being someone he insists he is not, exploring how identity is shaped by memory, relationships, and the stories we tell about ourselves.
Switzerland 1950s. While travelling by train, American man James Larkin White is arrested on his arrival at the Swiss border.
He is suspected of being Anatol Stiller, a missing Swiss sculptor accused of being involved in the dubious political “Smyrnov affair”.
Everyone seems to think he is Stiller, even Stiller’s estranged wife Julika (Paula Beer). The examining magistrate, the public prosecutor and even White’s public defender doubt his identity. But he rejects them, repeatedly insisting that he is not Stiller. He claims he is a victim of mistaken identity, but is he, or is he deliberately trying to assume a new identity?
For fans of the classics, Das Boot remains a cornerstone of German cinema.
Presented for its 45th anniversary in Wolfgang Petersen’s Director’s Cut, the film remains one of the defining achievements of modern war cinema: immersive, unsentimental and almost unbearably tense.
Adapted from Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel, the film places us inside the steel claustrophobia of U-96, following a German submarine crew through the monotony, terror and moral exhaustion of wartime patrol in the Atlantic.
What emerges is not a tale of heroism, but of endurance: men crushed by machinery, weather, command and history itself. Petersen’s great accomplishment is to strip war of spectacle without sacrificing suspense, creating a film that is at once technically astonishing and deeply human.
The German Film Festival is at Luna on SX Fremantle and Luna Leederville until May 27. For listings see lunapalace.com.au.