Screened as part of NZIFF 2014

Stations of the Cross 2014

Kreuzweg

Directed by Dietrich Bruggemann

Fourteen-year-old Maria resolves on a life of self-denial in a provocatively ambiguous drama, edged with satire, about a German family dedicated to an ultra-conservative strand of Catholicism.

Germany In German with English subtitles
107 minutes CinemaScope / DCP

Producers

Jochen Laube
,
Lief Alexis
,
Fabian Maubach

Screenplay

Anna Brüggemann
,
Dietrich Brüggemann

Photography

Alexander Sass

Editor

Vincent Assmann

Production designer

Klaus-Peter Platten

Costume designer

Bettina Marx

Sound

Jacob Ilgner

With

Lea van Acken (Maria)
,
Franziska Weisz (mother)
,
Florian Stetter (Father Weber)
,
Lucie Aron (Bernadette)
,
Moritz Knapp (Christian)
,
Michael Kamp (father)
,
Hanns Zischler (mortician)
,
Birge Schade (sports teacher)
,
Georg Wesch (Thomas)
,
Ramin Yazdani (physician)

Awards

Best Screenplay
,
Berlin International Film Festival 2014

Festivals

Berlin 2014

Proudly Supported by Goethe Institut

Elsewhere

A 14-year-old girl’s commitment to the extreme tenets of a conservative Roman Catholic sect is traced with a mix of compassion and irony in a film likely to rile the faithful and the faithless alike. Dedicated to self-denial, young Maria is tormented by the scrutiny of her fanatically observant mother and disconcerted by her feelings for a boy whose appetite for music has not stopped at Bach cantatas. Though his film is formally precise – enacted within a series of tableaux named for the Stations of the Cross – you may never know exactly where on the faith spectrum director Dietrich Brüggemann is coming from: a place of uncertainty, perhaps? What’s utterly sure is the heartbreaking credibility of young Lea van Acken as Maria. The script, which attains a spellbinding clarity of thought and emotion in her most direct encounters with her priest, won Best Script in Berlin this year.

“Made in a small number of shots, each framed and timed to perfection by a dazzlingly accurate ensemble cast and crew… Stations of the Cross nonetheless comes with a bigger surprise: its ‘wicked’ sense of humour, which only enhances its perfect poise between belief and scepticism.” — Nick James, Sight & Sound