Director's Portrait:

A Silent Country and not «a blossoming country».
Night Shapes and not «heroes of the day».

This is what his films are called. Lack of faith in the new German light of day transformed into cinema. And now Halbe Treppe: half a staircase.

So he even halves stairs. Where do half staircases lead? Never to a center, that's for certain. And definitely more likely down than up. One senses that it is impossible to stay in places where «half staircases» appear.

Unless that place is the cinema. Perhaps there are no better vantage points for film. After all, his is one of the leading names among the not very many of new German cinema. Andreas Dresen's Grill Point (Halbe Treppe) was the only one of four German films in competition at the 2002 Berlinale, which, according to most critics, could not be seen as a half measure in any sense. Although it only consists of four people, half-forgotten by life, living in a half-forgotten eastern German town and having various difficulties with each other. For they were careless enough to remind life of their existence. The directness of Grill Point countenances no reserve. It shoots us - and we ourselves are also made up of reserve - into the midst of a maelstrom which must, then, be life itself.

Dresen likes that sort of effect. He had already tried it out in Night Shapes and The Policewoman. All of these films are about the man on the street. There are few other German directors who lend such importance to the man on the street.

Cinema as an injection of reality. Driving truth to the point where it hurts. Anything less than that, Dresen believes, and a film is not worth starting on. Some people have been alienated by this. One critic wrote in the mid-nineties: «In their first takes, east German films make it obvious that they are cultural products of the old type, with basic conflicts, with pretensions and a message». The critic did not bother to conceal a certain dismay at such cultural fundamentalism. And it's true, when the German comedy volcano was already in the midst of erupting ten years ago, Dresen was very careful not to let himself be touched by either its lava or its rain of ash, consistently demanding the return of the socially critical film. Sounds like organized gloom. Films which offer us nothing to laugh about, about people who have nothing to laugh about? But Dresen corrected this. Weighty material simply has to learn to fly! Perhaps it is the tremendous lightness of his films which repeatedly renders us speechless. And indeed, why do people dress up laughter in extra «laughter films»? That is trivial. Andreas Dresen has not yet made a single comedy, and yet his films are amusing and grotesque all in one.

He was not necessarily destined for success. Andreas Dresen belongs to a generation in the East which could easily have gone under during the change from east to west. On the one hand, he was still young - twenty-seven years old at the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) - but the period which had shaped him was irrevocably over. It was a development under the auspices of the DEFA. The DEFA, the feature film studio of the GDR, stood for «cultural products of the old type», for content, message and pretensions. As yet without his own DEFA films, in 1990 this quasi-DEFA director found himself in a new anti-DEFA reality. An idiotic beginning, when you think about it.

But he had already noticed something. His film academy in Potsdam had sent its students out into the streets. They were to observe the fall of the GDR with the camera, and Dresen did just this. He made a few very fine, short «fall-of-the-GDR-films» and then a wonderful, longer one (Silent Country), and in the process he became aware of something remarkable: naturally, decline and fall are always a bit sad in some way - this lies in the nature of decline as a metaphysical fact - but above all, they can also be terribly funny. Dresen has never forgotten this. The fact that true metaphysics lie in the profane and that in reality they are funny. The fact that from the outside, the best tragedies appear fundamentally «untragic». And that the most successful comedies have to be tragedies anyway. Andreas Dresen makes this kind of film - Andreas-Dresen-films. An Andreas-Dresen-film comes about when skilled DEFA technique and the weight of truth meet up with the imperative of becoming lighter. Shake it off! Why cameras on rails when you can carry them on your shoulders? Why floodlights when it is light outside anyway? One is aware of the techniques in order to know what can be done without. Generally speaking, «becoming lighter» in this way is a sign of maturity. This is when the social worker's view begins to dance and is drawn with a magical certainty into what sociologists have decided to call «social reality».

In the case of Grill Point, Dresen's attention was finally drawn to the screenplay. Isn't a screenplay far too weighty? And so Andreas Dresen abandoned the screenplay, too.