Jan Schütte has an enviable track record with awards. In particular, the feature films he made in collaboration with the remarkably gifted writer-playwright-screenwriter Thomas Strittmatter were high-water marks in contemporary German cinema.

The pair's debut feature film, Dragon's Food (1987), about a Pakistani and a Chinese opening a multi-cultural restaurant in Hamburg, was selected for the Opera Prima section at Venice and was awarded the German Critics Prize and the Prix François Truffaut. Their second feature, Winkelmann's Journey (1990), a road movie about a Willy Lohman-like salesman criss-crossing the provinces of northern Germany, was awarded a CICAE Prize.

Goodbye America (1994), about an elderly Jewish-Polish immigrant couple living in New York, was invited to the Directors' Fortnight and was awarded a Silver German Film Prize and the Bavarian Film Prize. It was the pair's last film together before Strittmatter's premature death.

Schütte now returns to Cannes with one of the most fascinating German films of the season: Abschied (The Farewell), also known under its working titles "Buckower Elegien" and "The Bertolt Brecht Story." "It's quite different from my other films," Schütte points out. "This is a fictional story, although at the same time an authentic one. We are more interested in showing the situation of a great writer who has encountered many difficult situations in his private, political, and artistic lives." The "we" refers to screenwriter Klaus Pohl and actor Josef Bierbichler, a Bavarian like Brecht, who collaborated on the project.

On one of the last days of an unusually hot summer, just before his death in 1956, Bertolt Brecht is surrounded by close friends and former lovers at his lakeside villa near the Brandenburg town of Buckow north of Berlin. Shortly, he will leave for the Berliner Ensemble to begin the new season.

But right now he wants to look back on his past life, reflect on the political upheaval stemming from Stalin's recent death, and review his role as a dramatic force. His wife Helene Weigel is on hand, as are his daughter Barbara Berg, his former lover Ruth Berlau, his latest flame Käthe Reichel, and the dissident Wolfgang Harig. Over the course of the day ­ "from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon" ­ the peaceful setting erupts into a storm of raw emotions until Brecht finds himself at the very center of the controversy.

Ron Holloway