Nachtgestalten (Night Shapes). 1998. Written and directed by Andreas Dresen. With Meriam Abbas, Michael Gwisdek, Susanne Bormann. Dresen, who is well-known to MoMA’s audiences for The Policewoman (2000), Grill Point (2001), Willenbrock (2005) and Summer in Berlin (2006), made a key Berlin film, this dry comedy, that takes place one memorable night in June 1996 when, six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Pope John Paul II visited that city. Some people, the rich and the homeless, and those who want to ignore the “historic event” are inconvenienced. 104 min.
Titus Theaters
MoMA
11 West 53rd Street
As a special section of Kino!, MoMA’s annual survey of new German cinema, the Department of Film presents Kino Berlin, an exhibition of notable films made in Berlin since reunification. Organized by MoMA Senior Curator of Film Laurence Kardish, the series includes Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run (1998), Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Andreas Dresen’s Night Shapes (1999) and Summer in Berlin (2005), the Hissen Brothers’ documentary Dem Deutschen Volk (1996) on Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006), as well as the American premieres of two documentaries: Hanna Schygulla’s Hanna Hannah (2007) on Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial and Manfred Wilhelms’s Berlin: Pictures of a City (1998) on the city’s radical architectural changes.
For information on buying tickets to films at MoMA, go to moma.org/visit_moma/admissions.html or call MoMA at 212-708-9400.