Voyager

Volker Schlöndorff's film is adapted from Max Frisch's 1957 novel Homo Faber. Walter Faber, played by Sam Shepard, is an engineer who reads the world through probability, logic and technology and does not believe in coincidence. He survives a plane crash, then meets the young Sabeth, played by Julie Delpy, aboard a ship, and they travel together to Greece. The film's whole weight lies in the collapse of what Faber believes. A man who insists there is no such thing as coincidence finds himself in the middle of a run of impossible ones, and finally meets the cost of a relationship in his past. Barbara Sukowa plays the woman from that past. Rudy Wurlitzer wrote the screenplay. The film won the Bavarian Film Award for best production and a German Film Award for its handling of form. Who it is for: viewers who like European literary adaptation and films about the tension between fate and reason. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the relationship at the centre disturbing, since the film does not soften it.