RUDOLF THOME – ÜBERALL BLUMEN (RUDOLF THOME _ FLOWERS EVERYWHERE) by Serpil Turhan is being released by peripher Film on September 15. The film, which screened as special in this year's Forum programme, is a portrait "brimming with warmth, humour, and wit." (Birgit Kohler) "Rudolf Thome's idiosyncratic oeuvre was created with a continuity rare in German cinema – he has directed 28 feature-length films over more than four decades since 1968. The writing of the script for film no. 29 and the parallel efforts to secure financing form the thread that runs through this cinematic portrait, which consists wholly of conversations and observations around Thome’s home, a converted farm in Brandenburg. The filmmaker is nothing if not forthcoming, and the viewer has the opportunity to experience him in various other roles: as a gardener, a father, a cyclist, and a performer of his own persona."

Accompanying the relase, the fsk cinema in Berlin is showing three early works by Thome: "Detektive" (Germany 1968, 89'), "Rote Sonne" (Germany 1970, 90') and "Berlin Chamissoplatz" (Germany 1980, 112').

No other actor has ever mastered the art of the smile to the same extent as Setsuko Hara (1920–2015), a celebrated star and highly regarded idol who was one of the outstanding actors of 40s and 50s Japanese cinema. Her radiant smile floods whole scenes and at times cautiously undermines the expectations made of her in coy, ironic fashion. Yet her smile's impressive range also encompasses its darker shades: Hara's delicate, dignified, melancholy smile with which she responds to disappointments, papers over the emotions churning under the surface, and flanks life's sobering realizations. Her smiles don't just function as a condensed version of her ever-precise, expressive, yet understated acting ability, they also allow the very essence of the films they appear in to shine through for a brief moment, often studies of the everyday, post-war dramas which revolve around the break-up of family structures or the failure of marriages. Her performances tread a fine line between social expectation and personal desire in post-war Japan, as Hara attempts to lay claim to the autonomy of the female characters she plays – frequently with a smile.

Between 1935 – her brother-in-law helped her land her first role at the tender age of 15 – and 1962 Setsuko Hara acted in more than 100 films, of which those that emerged from her creative partnership with Yasujiro Ozu are the most well known, a collaboration which started with BANSHUN (Late Spring, 1949) and ended with KOHAYAGAWA KE NO AKI (Early Autumn, 1961). We are happy to present four films from this collaboration while also taking the series as an opportunity to broaden the view of this great actress, who died last September. We are thus showing her performances in films by Mikio Naruse, Keisuke Kinoshita, Akira Kurosawa, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and a German-Japanese co-production by Arnold Fanck, most of which are seldom screened in Germany.