The Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading independent film festival, has dedicated its 2024 retrospective to Dominik Graf’s films. The prolific filmmaker—Graf has created more than 50 films and TV series—has rightly been hailed as the “German John Carpenter”: a man who walked the line between genre and arthouse cinema. author-director. Over his long career, Graf has made films ranging from neo-noir thrillers to period romances, coming-of-age comedies to police procedurals. His work has been hailed as groundbreaking and groundbreaking.
And you’ve never heard of him.
Don’t be embarrassed. Graf is that rare director who, despite his decades of stellar performance, has never crossed over internationally. His films are rarely released outside Germany. Most of his best films were made for German television.
So for all you newbies to Dominik Graf, which is pretty much everyone, here’s a primer on his top 5 films to watch.
Clicks (1984)
(From left) Maximilian Wigger, Barbara Rudnik Clicks
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
The spirit of Roger Corman and the best of exploitation cinema roars through this early Graf film, a motorcycle thriller with enough style to ignite. The coming-of-age plot of “Sticks” is universal, but the setting – rural Germany in the early 1980s – is unique, and Graf extracts a surprisingly emotional performance from its young protagonist, none better than Dietmar Baer. Even better, he started out as a comedian but ended up tragically as a country braggadocio who ended up being the ultimate fifth wheel, drinking by the fire while his friends made out around him.
cat (1988)
(From left) Götz George, Gudrun Landgrebe cat
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Graf’s classic bank heist film stars Götz George as a criminal mastermind who sleeps with the bank director’s wife Jutta (Gudrun Landgrebe) in the film’s opening scene. Then direct the robbery from the outside, anticipating the police’s every move during the robbery. A cold thriller, but also full of surprising emotions.
player (1990)
(From left) Hansa Czypionka, Anica Dobra, Peter Lohmeyer player
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
German answer to Jean-Luc Goddard band separates Ostensibly a love story between an adventurous schoolgirl (Anika Dobra) and a nerdy gambling addict (Peter Lomeyer) who become entangled in a series of seemingly impossible But very interesting escapades that seem (deliberately) taken from crime movie clichés. The German script is full of double entendres and double entendres, a bit lost in translation, but playermade two years before Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir dogsremains a postmodern gem full of in-joke references for movie buffs.
Invincible (1994)
Invincible
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Graf attempts to make a Hollywood-style paranoid action thriller on a German TV budget [DM 12 million or around $6.5 million at the time] It’s likely destined to lag behind its larger, more visible U.S. counterparts. But just for its ambition, Invincible Worth a look. In the final half-hour, when Graf was at full strength, he could go toe-to-toe with the best.
Fabian – Go to the dogs (2021)
Starring Tom Schilling Fabian – Go to the dogs
Hanno Lenz/Lupo Film
This adaptation of Erich Kastner’s classic 1931 novel, about corruption at the heart of the Weimar Republic and the menacing rise of Nazism, shows Graf at his most stylistically ambitious . Eschewing the aesthetics of period films, he shot Fabianstarring Tom Schilling (A cup of coffee in Berlin), Albrecht Schuh (Everything is silent on the Western Front) and Saskia Rosendahl (never look away), like 90s independent films, primarily uses natural light and roaming reactive cameras, but uses 1930s “modernist” techniques to edit the footage, splicing black and white archival footage and using multi-window split screens to make the film feel simultaneous Old fashioned and cutting edge.
