Irish Film Institute -Summer in Berlin

Summer in Berlin

Director: Andreas Dresen

Germany| 2005. Subtitled. Colour. Dolby Digital Stereo. 107 min.


Director Andreas Dresen has described his delightful Summer in Berlin as a ‘cheerful film about loneliness’. It focuses on two best friends who live on adjoining floors in the same Prenzlauer Berg apartment block. Katrin (Inka Friedrich) is a 39-year-old single mother who’s finding it hard to find a job. The younger and more conventionally attractive Nike (Nadja Uhl) works as a ‘home help’ for the elderly. The two women have been close for many years, but over the course of one hot summer they find their friendship wearing thin. Most of the friction is caused by the arrival on the scene of truck-driver Ronald (Andreas Schmidt), a rough charmer whose torrid romantic history doesn’t dissuade the smitten Nike. Summer in Berlin was written by 74-year-old Wolfgang Kohlhaase, who captured life in Prenzlauer Berg over a quarter of a century ago in Konrad Wolf’s Solo Sunny. The new film is so fresh and true that you’d swear it emanated from the pen of a woman roughly the age of the central protagonists.

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