Never Look Away

A film that tells German history from the 1930s to the 1960s through the life of a painter. As a child, Kurt is close to his aunt. Under the Nazis she is classed as mentally ill and killed. Years later Kurt studies at an art academy in East Germany, where he has to paint what the state wants. Crossing to the West he meets the opposite pressure: in an environment dominated by conceptual art he does not know what to paint. The central idea is Kurt finding his own manner: painting newspaper and family photographs and blurring the surface. And one of the paintings he makes this way connects him, without his knowing, to his own past; his father-in-law is the doctor responsible for his aunt's death. The story was inspired by the life of the painter Gerhard Richter. Richter did not support the production and said openly that he did not like the result; he objected to the use of his biography. Tom Schilling plays Kurt, Sebastian Koch the doctor and Paula Beer his wife. Caleb Deschanel is the cinematographer. It was Oscar-nominated for foreign film and cinematography. An affecting production for anyone who likes long-form historical drama and films about art. It runs close to three hours and proceeds in classical form; it is not a record of Richter's life but a fiction drawn from it.