Fabian: Going to the Dogs

Dominik Graf has spent forty years making some of the best German television and comparatively little cinema, and Fabian — adapted from Erich Kästner's 1931 novel, competing at the Berlinale in 2021 — is the summation of that career. It runs 176 minutes and switches between 16mm, Super 8 and digital, with archive footage of Weimar Berlin cut in and an aspect ratio that changes when it suits him.

Tom Schilling plays Fabian, a doctor of literature writing cigarette advertisements, and Saskia Rosendahl is Cornelia, a law graduate trying to get into films. Albrecht Schuch plays Labude, the rich friend whose politics are a hobby until they are not. Kästner wrote the novel as the Republic was dying and it was censored within two years; Graf keeps the narration, and the effect is of a book being read aloud over a city that already knows.

German critics called it the best German film of its year and it took eleven Lola nominations. The formal restlessness is not decoration — it is the argument, a film about a collapsing order made in a style that refuses to settle. Long, dense, and the strongest thing in the catalogue about how the Weimar years actually felt from inside.