Ulrich Tukur – Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Ido Fluk – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

How an 18-year-old girl came to stage what would become the biggest selling jazz album in history – narrative feature is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 5th

At a party honouring her career as a music promoter, 50-year-old Vera Brandes (Suzanne Wolff) is upbraided by her dentist father (Ulrich Tukur from The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke, 2009; The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, 2006; Solaris, Steven Soderbergh, 2002; Lulu, George Moorse, Peter Zadek, TV movie, 1991) that she never amounted to anything. In a quasi-documentary sequence, she intervenes as narrator to talk about this being a really bad start, and proceeds to play, like a presenter in a music documentary, some music takes abandoned by bad starts from, among others The Cramps and Bob Dylan.

The film starts again, this time with 18-year-old Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) who enjoys hanging out with friends at jazz venues, such as the one where English club owner Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts from September 5, Tim Fehlbaum, 2024; Alien Romulus, Fede Alvarez, 2024; Allied, Robert Zemeckis, 2016) is playing. Getting his attention by buying him an ice cream cone, Vera chats with him and, by the time she has walked her bicycle with him to his hotel has been commissioned to book him a European tour “because I can’t imagine anyone saying no to you.”… Read the rest

The White Ribbon
(Das Weiße Band)

Director – Michael Haneke – 2009 – Austria, Germany – Cert. 15 – 144m

*****

Reviewed for Third Way magazine to coincide with UK release date 13/11/2009.

Plays in Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 6th and on BFI Player from Thursday, September 11th 2025.

Haneke’s first period drama for the big screen is set in 1913-14 in a Northern German Protestant village where strange accidents befall the community. A doctor (Rainer Bock), out riding a regular route, is brought down and injured by a wire between two trees. The wife of a farm labourer is killed when factory floorboards give way beneath her. Children are abducted. A baby’s window is left open in Midwinter. A building burns. But who is – or are – responsible?

The film sets out its cast of characters in terms of the social hierarchy. The landowning classes are represented by the local Baron (Ulrich Tukur), his wife (Ursina Lardi) and their child; the professional classes by a widowed doctor, the midwife (Susanne Lothar) “who has made herself useful to him”, the Baron’s steward (Josef Bierbichler), the village Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) and the local teacher (Christian Friedel) – also as an old man the narrator (Ernst Jacobi) – who is courting the nanny of the Baron’s son; the working classes by numerous agricultural labourers who generally feature less prominently in the story.… Read the rest