The Oldenburg Film Festival, Germany’s leading independent film festival, has dedicated its 2024 retrospective to the films of Dominik Graf. The incredibly prolific director (Graf has more than 50 films and TV series to his credit) is rightly hailed as “Germany’s John Carpenter”: an auteur filmmaker who walks the line between genre and auteur cinema. In his long career, Graf has made everything from neo-noir thrillers to period romances, from coming-of-age comedies to police procedurals. His work has been hailed as pioneering and groundbreaking.
And you've never heard of it.
Don’t be embarrassed. Graf is that rare breed of director who despite decades of excellent work has never crossed the national borders. Few of his films have been distributed outside Germany. Most of his best films have been made for German TV.
So, for all you Dominik Graf newbies out there, which is basically all of you, here’s a guide to his top 5 favorite movies to watch.
Move (1984)
(from left) Maximilian Wigger, Barbara Rudnik inside Move
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
The spirit of Roger Corman and the best of exploitation cinema resonate in Graf’s first feature, a motorcycle thriller with enough style to burn. The coming-of-age-in-the-country plot is universal, but the setting, rural Germany in the early 1980s, is unique, and Graf draws surprisingly emotional performances from his young leads, none better than Dietmar Bär, who shines as an initially comical but ultimately tragic village braggart who ends up being the ultimate fifth wheel, drinking by the fire while his friends make out around him.
The cat (1988)
(from left) Götz George, Gudrun Landgrebe in The cat
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Graf’s classic bank robbery film stars Götz George as a criminal mastermind who sleeps with the bank manager’s wife Jutta (Gudrun Landgrebe) in the film’s opening scene, then proceeds to direct the robbery from the outside, anticipating the police’s every move as he tries not only to steal the contents of the safe, but also to extort a ransom of 3 million marks from the hostages. A chilling thriller that also manages to be surprisingly emotional.
Players (1990)
(from left) Hansa Czypionka, Anica Dobra, Peter Lohmeyer inside Players
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
This German response to Jean Luc Goddard Band aside is ostensibly a love story between an adventurous student (Anica Dobra) and a gambling-addicted nerd (Peter Lohmeyer) who get involved in a series of unlikely but very funny adventures that seem (intentionally) drawn from crime movie clichés. The German script, full of puns and wordplay, gets a bit lost in translation but Playersmade two years before Quentin Tarantino The Reservoir DogsIt remains a postmodern gem full of ironic references for cinephiles of the genre.
The Invincibles (1994)
The Invincibles
Courtesy of the Oldenburg Film Festival
Graf's attempt to make a Hollywood-style paranoid action thriller on a German TV budget [DM 12 million or around $6.5 million at the time] was probably destined to fall short of its bigger, flashier US counterparts. But just because of its ambition, The Invincibles It's worth watching. And the action in the final half hour, when Graf risks everything, can compete with the best.
Fabian — Going to the dogs Italian: (2021)
Tom Schilling in Fabian — Going to the dogs
Hanno Lentz/Wolf Film
This adaptation of Erich Kastner's classic 1931 novel about the corruption at the heart of the Weimar Republic and the menacing rise of Nazism finds Graf at his most stylistically ambitious. Eschewing the aesthetics of period films, he has shot Fabianowith Tom Schilling (A coffee in Berlin), Albrecht Schuch (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Saskia Rosendahl (Never look away), as a 1990s independent film, using mostly natural light and a mobile, responsive camera, but editing the image using 1930s “modernist” techniques, inserting black-and-white archival footage, and using split-screens in multiple windows, making the film appear both old-fashioned and cutting-edge.