Gems and pearls at the 36th Munich Film Festival

Munich takes care in its selection to show the best of the best at the film festival, including current international film productions not yet seen in German cinemas. This year, that included "Happy as Lazzaro" by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, a film recently celebrated in Cannes and for some observers, the most beautiful film of the competition. It was awarded a Palme for best screenplay.

A bit smaller, but just as worth your time were the films shown in the festival's Spotlight series, which features movies by directors of the future. Lively, the films often tell the stories of outsiders. Like the Spanish film "Carmen y Lola," about a young woman from a Roma clan trying to break out of a predetermined path.

"Independent cinema is committed to its themes, with its protagonists, locations, artistic vision and experimental approach — more so than with the red carpet or social media resonance," the festival's programmers wrote. One good example of this is the Austrian documentary about an electronic waste heap in Ghana called, "Welcome to Sodom: your smartphone is already here."

What are Germany's film directors doing, which themes do they address, how do they deal with the medium formally? Answers can be found in the 16 premieres that are part of the New German Cinema series. "Wackersdorf" by Oliver Haffner picks up on recent West German history by taking up the 1980s civil resistance against a planned reprocessing plant in Upper Palatinate for an exciting feature film.

Sometimes the small screen can have the same impact as cinema. That's the case with a few works that premiered in Munich and will soon be on German television. One of the highlights: Dominik Graf's "Hanne," about a woman (Iris Berben) who gets the message that she may have leukemia on a Friday. The results of her tests won't come through until Monday. How would you spend the weekend?

Every festival that knows what it's doing is also screening TV series on a big screen. In Munich, that included a premiere of the "Perfume" series as well as the multi-part "Servus Baby." The tale in four episodes follows a woman in her early 30s who deals with being suddenly single in chic, expensive Munich. What does that mean for her life's dreams: finding love, having children, a career?

Women's worlds are also the focus of the films of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. This year's festival retrospective is dedicated to the director, whose feature film debut in 2001, "The Swamp" (above picture) looks at the moral morass of Argentine family structures. The films of the director are magical and realistic at the same time: recommended works!

The Munich festival traditionally looks behind the scenes of the business: The series Lights! Camera! Action! showcases films about filmmaking. This year, works about Ingmar Bergman, Milos Forman and Orson Welles are part of the program. "The Eyes of Orson Welles" focuses on a little-known side of the directorial titan, using unpublished material from the film's designer.

And for anyone who thought that everything had already been said about the Swedish director of the century, the documentary "Bergman: A Year in a Life" proved there's still more to explore. It addresses Bergman's long-lasting sympathy for the Nazis and covers his very individual perspective on the past and upbringing.

One special part of the festival is the open air series, offering audiences the chance to see many film classics. In 2018, eight boxing films were shown under the motto, "Faust aufs Auge" — literally, "a fist in the eye," an expression referring to something that fits like a glove. Classics of the genre like Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" brought the festival to a high point.