2007 SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award: Dani Levy
Dani Levy is a unique and paradoxical voice in contemporary independent filmmaking: a Jewish filmmaker who for 27 years has lived and worked in Berlin, a politically incorrect scriptwriter who is a box office success, and a farceur with a serious social intent.
Levy’s mother was born in Berlin; in 1939, at the age of 12, she fled to Switzerland, where Dani was born in 1957. During Levy’s childhood, his mother’s family’s stories of suffering under Nazi oppression were, in his words, “considered taboo,” so his decision to move to Berlin in 1980 was something of a family earthquake, with reverberations that are felt in his films. His insistence on broaching the taboos of contemporary German-Jewish relations—in fictional contemplations of Jewish identity in Germany (Without Me, SFJFF 1993), in comic portrayals of Jewish assimilation (Go for Zucker, SFJFF 2005), and especially in his latest provocation, My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler, an outrageous satire set during the Third Reich—are in part an attempt to establish a cultural dialogue within a vast silence. Not only is Levy one of the very few Jewish filmmakers working in Germany, his films are willing to take on both German and Jewish stereotypes in bold, often irreverent ways. They catalyze necessary public conversations, but like all powerful art, they are fueled by a deep private need. Levy himself has acknowledged that his films “are my way of trying to engage in a dialogue with my mother.”
A Dani Levy film is invariably laced with humor, empathy and a tragicomic sense of the absurd. It is telling that Levy’s early theatrical training was in the circus, and though he gave up a career as an acrobat and clown early on, he has been continuously performing a high-wire act of funny/sad high hijinks in his filmmaking. His first three films in a tragicomic vein were followed by three more serious scripts, including the thriller The Giraffe, which he made for X-Filme, the production company he co-founded with three fellow Berlin filmmakers. With Zucker, Levy returned to his beloved Jewish humor, in which, he says, one encounters “people who evoke emotions in you, with whom and at whom you can laugh. And perhaps you get the feeling that you've seen a Jew from a completely new perspective, which might take away some of your fear of ‘the other’… [They are] people who are full of the everyday chaos that accompanies all our lives.”
PANEL: "Breaking Taboos: Jews and Germans Today"
Please join a conversation on Tuesday July 24 at 6:00 pm with Dani Levy, German Consul General Rolf Schütte and others immediately following the screening of Just an Ordinary Jew and prior to My Fuehrer. Free admission with ticket to either film.
Films
Giraffe, The
In this sexy, taut thriller by SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award winner Dani Levy, a mysterious death links two generations of families in Germany and America.
My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler
A depressed Adolf Hitler hires a Jewish acting teacher to reclaim his charisma in this wicked and controversial parody from Germany by Jewish director Dani Levy.