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The Oldenburg International Film Festival, often dubbed Germany’s Sundance, will this year pay tribute to one of the country’s most revered filmmakers, Dominik Graf, with a special retrospective.

The 31st edition of the festival, running from Sept. 11 to 15, will spotlight Graf’s prolific career, as one of Germany’s few masters in genre filmmaking.

Graf, 71, began his career in the 1970s, inspired by American indie directors like Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich and French auteurs such as Jean-Pierre Melville, using arthouse techniques and storytelling for crime, comedy and other genre tales.

The festival’s retrospective will showcase six of Graf’s most influential films, including thrillers Die Katze (1988) and Die Sieger (1995/2018 director’s cut), both of which have become genre-defining in German cinema and exemplify Graf’s distinctive, taut, economical approach to plot and character.

Alongside his feature film work, Graf is credited with setting new standards for...

One of the highlights of this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, it's already apparent, is a retrospective of the work of Dominik Graf, a genre specialist mostly unknown outside his natve Germany, who has worked in both film and TV, specialising mainly in crime dramas. The program also includes other German crime TV shows selected by Graf to contextualise his work (including Sam Fuller's Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street and uber-rare work by Czech emigre Zbynek Brynych, best known otherwise for The Fifth Horseman is Fear).

Graf's work includes pieces from the seventies to the present day. By working in TV he has been able to work regularly, something denied most feature directors, and seems to thrive on the tight schedules and budgets. Nightwatch, a 1993 episode of the long-running series "Der Fahnder", comes on like Fleischer's The Narrow Margin, with a cop guarding a gangster's moll who doesn't...

Below you will find our total coverage of the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam by Daniel Kasman.

Above: Jean-Claude Brisseau's La fille de nulle part.

Trembling Disturbed

On Sergei Loznitsa's Letter, Peter Schreiner's Fata Morgana, Pedro Costa's Sweet Exorcist, and Filipa César's Cacheu

Two as One as Many

On Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters (1967) and Long Farewells (1971), Jean-Claude Brisseau's La fille de nulle part, and David Gatten's By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging.

Of Cinema, Pixels and Chinese Warfare

On Mary Helena Clark's Orpheus (Outtakes), Makino Takashi's 2012, and Johnnie To's Drug War

Graf Attack!: or The Possibility Space (The Cinema of Dominik Graf)

On Dominik Graf, including Die Katze (1988), Spieler (1990), Der Fahnder: Nachtwache (1990/1993], Die Sieger (1994), Denk ich an Deutschland - Das Wispern im Berg der Dinge (1997), München - Geheimnisse einer Stadt (2002), Der Felsen (2002), Die Freunde der Freunde (2002), Hotte im Paradies...

Rotterdam this year has offered one certifiable giant discovery in international cinema: German filmmaker Dominik Graf, revealed in a simultaneously introductory and interventionist retrospective programmed by Christoph Huber and Olaf Möller. An incredibly prolific filmmaker beginning in the late 1970s, Graf has interwoven his cinema into the fabric of the German television industry, producing a body of work ranging from television episodes, made-for-tv films, essay movies, documentaries, and a handful of films intended for the cinema.

Yet despite Graf's prodigious output of nearly sixty works, its primarily creation for national television has meant that it has been essentially unavailable to English-speaking audiences prior to Rotterdam's 17 film retrospective. The first film of his I saw was Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around) in the middle of the Dreileben trilogy in 2010, notably another for-television project, but one which had festival and theatrical ambitions beyond German living rooms, perhaps due...