German cinema has experienced something of a revival in the past decade. Germany has seen an increase in the quality, quantity and variety of films produced, and the burgeoning German film scene has already produced a number of promising young directors.
One is Berlin-based filmmaker Thorsten Schmidt, whose EIN YETI ZUM VERLIEBEN is a quite a decent family film. Made for German television, the film nevertheless stretches its shoestring budget very well and is a cut above many a family telefilm. It deserves a wider audience and could have easily been distributed theatrically.
YETI tells the story of Tim Bergmann (Oliver Stokowksi, who went on to play one of the inmates in DAS EXPERIMENT) a down-on-his-luck zoologist, his 12-year-old daughter and an opportunistic female business journalist who become embroiled in an adventure involving a captured bigfoot creature on an expedition to the Himalayas. The acting is uniformly good throughout and the Yeti is indeed lovable. The only complaint is that the film is a bit too fast-paced, but then this may be appropriate to TV.
Schmidt has a broadly appealing, breezy directorial style that shows versatility and much promise (his short film ROCHADE won a student Academy Award), and Bernhard Jasper's kinetic and precise cinematography, with streamlined and exquisitely-framed visuals, is about as far-removed from TV movie cinematography as one can get. Schmidt and Jasper are talents to watch out for!
