German artist Kurt Barnert has escaped East Germany and now lives in West Germany, but is tormented by his childhood under the Nazis and the GDR-regime.
Young artist Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) has fled to West-Germany, but he continues to be tormented by the experiences he made in his childhood and youth in the Nazi years and during the GDR-regime. When he meets the student Ellie (Paula Beer), he is convinced that he has met the love of his life and begins to create paintings that mirror not only his own fate, but also the traumas of an entire generation.Written by
Wiedemann & Berg Film
During the air raid on Dresden on February 13-14, 1945, there must have been snow (because of the cold winter at the time), when the hero watched the Avro Lancaster bombers flying - and most importantly, Richter lived in Reichenau (now Bogatynia), located 100 km east of Dresden, so he couldn't watch the incoming planes. See more »
"Everything that is true is beautiful." Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling)
Never Look Away is a truly beautiful film, catching the biography of fictional artist Kurt Barnet (truly a veiled biopic of renowned contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter). Unlike most artist bios, this one lets you breathe in the Nazi repression and post-war liberation without forgetting Kurt is struggling to find his voice amidst crushing oppression and daunting liberation.
As a young, talented boy watching the abduction of his beloved Aunt Lisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), Kurt suffers subsequent humiliations before he arrives as an artist moving from social realism favored by the socialists, communists, and Soviet Union to photographic realism, to abstraction and combinations therein favored by the world. To be expected, the memory of his aunt informs almost every major decision of his short life as an unknown young man.
The film, a nominee from Germany for foreign Oscar, is most exciting not when he courts his wife or faces down the Nazis, but when he discovers his voice. It is gratifying to watch the slow process and feel a part of his discoveries. Most artist biopics miss giving that intimate sense of the creative process although in the end the artist is never fully explained even here. That's also what gives such a thrill-the realization that the gift is from someplace unknowable because it goes beyond ordinary human understanding.
Never Look Away is writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's gift to us of drama and insight, three absorbing hours that seem but an hour. Barely time enough to get to know genius. My gift to you is a short review, so you can spend the time on a timeless movie.
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"Everything that is true is beautiful." Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling)
Never Look Away is a truly beautiful film, catching the biography of fictional artist Kurt Barnet (truly a veiled biopic of renowned contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter). Unlike most artist bios, this one lets you breathe in the Nazi repression and post-war liberation without forgetting Kurt is struggling to find his voice amidst crushing oppression and daunting liberation.
As a young, talented boy watching the abduction of his beloved Aunt Lisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), Kurt suffers subsequent humiliations before he arrives as an artist moving from social realism favored by the socialists, communists, and Soviet Union to photographic realism, to abstraction and combinations therein favored by the world. To be expected, the memory of his aunt informs almost every major decision of his short life as an unknown young man.
The film, a nominee from Germany for foreign Oscar, is most exciting not when he courts his wife or faces down the Nazis, but when he discovers his voice. It is gratifying to watch the slow process and feel a part of his discoveries. Most artist biopics miss giving that intimate sense of the creative process although in the end the artist is never fully explained even here. That's also what gives such a thrill-the realization that the gift is from someplace unknowable because it goes beyond ordinary human understanding.
Never Look Away is writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's gift to us of drama and insight, three absorbing hours that seem but an hour. Barely time enough to get to know genius. My gift to you is a short review, so you can spend the time on a timeless movie.