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While the word was that the new generation of German filmmakers were fixated by comedy and churning out one successful ribtickler after another, down in the backstreets of Munich a film school grad was busy scripting a moving drama that was to slowly but surely work its way up and up beyond all expectations.
Caroline Link’s moving drama Jenseits der Stille (Beyond Silence) has now gone one step further to top it all and made it to the Oscars to compete for the title of best foreign film, the first German film since Helmut Dietl’s Schtonk in 1992 to stand for the accolade. One of the top local hits of 1997, the film succeeding in proving the ‘negaholics’ who say that German films don’t sell abroad wrong by selling to 15 territories.
Notching up 1.6 million visitors the pic is Link’s first feature and the quick success unexpected. "I’m still a beginner," she says. "It’s sometimes a really big pressure that people expect you then to be so successful again."
The powerful tearjerker centres on the conflict between a musically gifted child, born to deaf parents, and her father, who is still troubled over painful childhood memories of his sister stealing the limelight with her musical talents. "I wanted to make a film about a conflict between a father and daughter," says Link. "The idea didn’t originally have anything to do with the deaf world, but when I was on a visit to LA, I came into contact with this world and was fascinated and through this I could combine the two themes."
Although Link is in a dream of a position now, getting the project off the ground and people to back a serious project was a long process. "I had the first draft lying on my desk in 1990," she says. "I got some support from the BMI and BR but apart from that people were totally sceptical. Nobody could imagine, none of the film subsidy bodies, that this film could work here," she says.
Likewise convincing a distributor to take on the project was a hard task. "Right up to the last moment we had no distrib," she says. "Then Christoph Ott from BVI took it on. It was very courageous of them," she says... and the rest is history. Lisa Foreman