Simon Verhoeven cast his own mother to play a grandmother, and Germany bought more than a million tickets to watch her do it. That film, Oh, This Unspeakable Void, leads a three-night run at TIFF Lightbox this October, where the Goethe-Institut Toronto has gathered German cinema’s most well-worn subject — the family — into a single program.
The series, “Next of Kin: Family on Film,” screens Oct. 8, 13 and 15, all at 6:30 p.m. Verhoeven’s film opens the run with its Canadian premiere; two Berlinale titles, Claire Burger’s Foreign Language and Annika Pinske’s Talking About the Weather, arrive as Toronto premieres.
Oh, This Unspeakable Void adapts Joachim Meyerhoff’s autobiographical bestseller about a 20-year-old who lands a place at Munich’s Otto Falckenberg drama school after his brother’s death and moves into his grandparents’ villa in Nymphenburg. Bruno Alexander plays Joachim; Senta Berger, Verhoeven’s mother on screen and off, plays Inge, with Michael Wittenborn as Hermann. Set in the early 1990s, the 137-minute film was produced by Komplizen Film’s Maren Ade, Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach — the team behind Toni Erdmann — and it opened at No. 1 in Germany before collecting German Film Awards hardware for Berger and Wittenborn, plus a Bronze for Best Feature Film. It also took the audience prize at Serbia’s Palić European Film Festival in July. The Lightbox screening is co-presented with the Ageless International Film Festival.
Burger’s Foreign Language (2024, 101 minutes) sends a 17-year-old named Fanny from Strasbourg to Leipzig on a language exchange, into the home of a girl her age and that girl’s quietly unravelling mother, played by Nina Hoss. Chiara Mastroianni plays Fanny’s own mother back in France. Burger won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2014 for Party Girl; this one competed at Berlin in 2024 and is co-presented by Ageless and France au Canada.
Pinske’s Talking About the Weather (2022, 89 minutes) closes the run. Anne Schäfer plays Clara, who has traded a working-class village in the former East for an academic career in Berlin, an affair with a student and a prickly friendship with her thesis adviser — Sandra Hüller — until a trip home for her mother’s birthday puts three generations of women in one room. The screening includes a video introduction from Pinske, who worked as Maren Ade’s assistant on Toni Erdmann before making her own first feature.
Hüller, who appears in two of the three titles, has a way of turning up wherever German-language film is having a moment. In October, she gets a Lightbox double bill out of it.
