A Voluntary Year
part from extending the recent streak of exemplary features from directors grouped (sometimes contentiously) under the Berlin School banner, continues the Teutonic tradition of the auteurist small-screen work. A television commission for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the film was co-written and co-directed by Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, who were colleagues during their time at Hamburg’s School of Fine Arts. Forgoing the genre enticements that invigorate Christian Petzold’s entries into the long-running series or the prodigious oeuvre of Dominik Graf (arguably the most distinguished German director working largely outside theatrical exhibition), the film recalls Maren Ade’s (2016) by using a central father-daughter relationship to orchestrate an unpredictable, ever-shifting dynamic of freedom and control. But where Ade’s film is discursive and sprawling, Winckler and Köhler’s is a tightly
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