Poster: ©Pandora Film Production Harry has just retired, and Lore is about to. The two have been married for what feels like an age; they know each other inside out, yet their daughter’s upcoming wedding is becoming a bone of contention. Lore organises, whilst Harry grumbles gruffly. Well, this is going to be a laugh… Together with his regular screenwriter Laila Stieler, director Andreas Dresen has turned Elke Heidenreich’s and Bernd Schroeder’s stories about growing old into a film with affectionate bite. Dagmar Manzel and Joachim Król also lend this ‘old love’ a mischievous, youthful spirit.

Elke Heidenreich
Image: ©Pandora Film Production

It would be mischievous to read autobiographical undertones into the fact that Elke Heidenreich and her ex-husband Bernd Schroeder collaborated on a book of stories about a married couple on the verge of retirement, and then called it ‘Alte Liebe’ (Old Love). They did this in 1995, years after their divorce. By then, Heidenreich had already made a name for herself as a literary critic on radio and TV, as the cabaret artist Else Stratmann, and as an author (*Kolonien der Liebe*, 1992). She became the most successful literary critic alongside Marcel Reich-Ranicki between 2003 and 2008 with her programme *Lesen!* on ZDF.

Jenny Erpenbeck
Image: ©STUDIOCANAL / Ziegler Film

It was, amongst other things, the Sunday letters written by eleven-year-old Doris Kaplan that inspired the writer Jenny Erpenbeck to write her novel *Heimsuchung*. Kaplan wrote them in the 1940s, even whilst she was being deported with her mother to the Warsaw Ghetto. She is the only historically documented character in *Heimsuchung*. All the others were freely and vividly invented by Erpenbeck, who was born in East Berlin in 1967 and, in 2024, became the first German to win the prestigious International Booker Prize.

Poster ©AppleTV The next day’s lottery numbers, or a reunion with the love of his life. There’s nothing that homunculi can’t predict. Ever since Michael’s girlfriend suddenly vanished, he’s left no stone unturned in his quest to find her again. And so he sets about crafting a few homunculi using the recipe of his eccentric, senile father, Brian.
A pinch of Goethe’s *Faust II*, a visual dash of *Catweazle*, the gruff coolness of Pierce Quigley, the sheer joy of a reunion with Monty Python’s Sir Michael Palin, and the idiosyncratic talent of writer, director and actor Mackenzie Crook. That’s all it takes for the (as yet) six episodes of ‘Small Prophets’.

Image ©House House The landscape is barren, but the atmosphere is magnificent. In groups of between two and 12, the aim is to roam playfully as digital building blocks through the real-life Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria, Australia, solving puzzles and, above all, communicating a great deal. The latter depends not only on the languages spoken by the online players, but also on how far apart they are from one another in the game.
‘Big Walk’ is inspired by the traditional walkabouts of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, which are about getting to know oneself and nature.