Festival of German Films 2011

Great director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire) is the special guest of the festival that hits Melbourne this month courtesy of Goethe-Institut Australia. The festival's 10th year will see 32 feature films screened alongside new documentary and retrospective programmes.

Opening the festival is Goethe!, a period drama starring Alexander Fehling that tracks the early life and loves of the great German writer. Jumping forward a few hundred years, Vincent Wants to Sea follows an Italian boy with Tourette's Syndrome who flees his clinic.

Straight from rave receptions at the 2011 Berlinale, Almanya delivers a huge dose of laughter with questions of German-Turkish identity, while Single by Contract fills the festival's rom-com quota with its tale of unexpected romance.

The Radical Docs programme covers everything from art (The Radical Gardener, Super Art Market) and housing (Children of the Commune, On the Safe Side) to surf culture (Keep Surfing, Bikini Revolution), and German Currents offers a retrospective of recent German cinema with ten films of the past decade, from previous festival successes to recent unseens.

Screenings take place at Palace Cinema Como and Kino Cinemas.