In Ulrich Köhler’s New York Movie Festival the world premiere ”Gavagai“A filmmaker and her star are tasked with making a reverse constructed” Medea “in Senegal.
Euripides plays, about a woman who murder her own children as a tribute to the man she loves and is obsessed with, here is revised as a story about a white woman (Maren Eggert, who plays the actress in film within the film) exhausted by a black African community and in a Film-Inom movie directed by a filmmaker (Nathalie Richard) who looks curious as Claire Denis. (The director said, in a conversation with IndieWire, that this is purely coincidence.) At the same time, at the film’s Berlin Film Festival premiere, its star Nourou (Jean-Christophe Folly) is in free fall after a race with a Polish hotel safety heavy.
Köhler is a filmmaker whose partner, in reality, is Maren AdeThe author/director for films including the Oscar-nominated Screwball Classic “Toni Erdmann” and the division drama “All others.” As Köhler explained to IndieWire, the two collaborate and provide feedback on each other’s films. “Gavagai” is not really a comedy, not really a drama, not really an industry satire, with a tone that constantly switches from the comedian to the privilege-wide serious. It’s one of a handful of world premieres at the new york movie festival, and a movie that will delight insiders and festival-goers for its sharp crritique of how movies are delivered into the world: köhler shot the movie durses hedae festiva movie Inquiry Into the Charged Landscape of Who-Gets-to-Direct-What Filmmaking Questions in 2025.
“It’s about something very serious at the base, but its main characters are all privileged people, so the fall from what is happening is psychologically tough, but they will not end up on the street,” Köhler said. “In this attitude, with actors and a director as the main characters, I felt I could do what I did.”
Köhler previously directed the film “Sleeping Sickness”, which he shot in Cameroon and experiences from the film shooting in Africa led to this. “The central scene in Berlin, the racially profile scene, is something that really happened during the premiere of” sleep disease, “Köhler said about” Gavagai “, with reference to an incident that happened to that movie star (and this one), Jean-christophe Folly. Character, the Film-Inom movie’s leadership, rushes to Nourou help when a Polish security detail asks him for his ID but no one else’s.
“The security guy that started the whole thing was a Polish guy who didn’t spoke German so well, and with what Jean-Christophe and later I got a fight,” Köhler said. “The one most affected by this was obviously Jean-Christophe because his festival experience, and the fact that this was his first feature film with an important role playing in a festival in the competition, he didn’t really enjoy it because that guy and hotel policy ruined his experience. But then, I added it, and thought I would help him.”
As for the Director Caroline Lescot’s (Nathalie Richard) Likeness to Claire Denis – Herself A Filmmaker Who Has Interrogated Colonialism Throughout Her Career, From “White Material” to “35 Shots of Rum” – Köhler Said it was “Not intention Male. For me, she’s an alter-ego. But I found it more interesting than just having the usual old white man. It seemed like a more complex (situation).
There is a scene in the film where Caroline is grilled at a press conference on her consequences to rewrite Euripides text, and she quotes James Baldwin, which is not helpful for the demanding press scorp. “She refers to Baldwin’s text about being the first black person in a Swiss village, and he explains quite well why it is not the same as when a white person, from a position of power and privilege, arrives at an African village that has not seen any white person before, it is a very different situation from a black man who comes in a village in Europe.”
“I hope I have not behaved so badly, but I think the printing situation as a filmmaker, author is under is quite tough with the financial limitations and also with always having to motivate yourself because you may not earn movies that make a lot of money, but you still ask for a lot,” Köhler said. “I don’t think you will find many directors who would say they are not capable of that kind of behavior.”
When it comes to Köhler’s collaboration with Ade, who is the first person to see a rough cut of his films, he said, “when we did not have children it was much more intense. Now it’s all about finding time to do it.”
