Never Look Away

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Never Look Away (Werk ohne Autor) was nominated for two Academy Awards in 2019 (Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography (Caleb Deschanel)) alongside three Lola wins at the German Film Awards. The film consolidated Donnersmarck, after his Oscar-winning The Lives of Others (2006), as one of the most internationally significant German directors of his generation. The screenplay is loosely inspired by the early life of the German painter Gerhard Richter, though the film does not formally claim to be a biographical work and Richter has publicly distanced himself from it.

Across approximately three decades (late-1930s Dresden, the post-war Soviet-East-German period, the 1960s migration to West Germany) a young East German painter named Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling) navigates the broader political-historical reorganisations of the country. He marries Ellie (Paula Beer), the daughter of the prominent gynaecologist Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), whose own wartime past is far more complicated than the family's post-war respectability suggests. Saskia Rosendahl plays Kurt's young aunt Elisabeth in flashback sequences.

The film operates simultaneously as historical-political drama, biographical-art-cinema work, and meditation on what kinds of personal-historical inheritance produce major artistic work. Caleb Deschanel's photography across the multiple period registers (1930s-style Reichskanzlei interiors, postwar East-German exteriors, 1960s Düsseldorf studio settings) and Schilling's central performance combine into a film whose three-hour runtime is one of the more carefully sustained commitments of recent German cinema.