Anno Saul, who directed Kebab Connection, Germany’s entry in our 2006 EU Film Festival, returns this year with Where is Fred?, a politically incorrect hit comedy in which a man pretends to be confined to a wheelchair in order to win the woman he loves. “Fred [played by German star Til Schweiger] wants to get
married to Mara, who is a single parent. The hitch is that Mara’s son Linus hates Fred and is bent on getting rid of this unwanted male competition. There is
only one way to win Linus’s favour: to get him an original basketball personally signed by ALBA-Berlin superstar Mercurio Müller. And the only place to get it is the handicapped section, where Mercurio Müller throws the ball after each record basket. Fred sees no other option: he needs to pretend to be handicapped in order to gain access to the handicapped section. When Fred
actually catches the ball he is the star of the evening. The following media hype forces him to lead an exhausting and comical double life ... ” (German Films). Colour, 35mm, in German with English subtitles. 107 mins.

“Ten years ago, Sean Walsh, a young Dublin filmmaker, set out on an ambitious and improbable journey: to make a feature film of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Despite countless setbacks, innumerable revisions (Walsh estimates he has read the novel 50 times and written 800 drafts of his screenplay) and widespread disbelief within the film community that he could ever make the film, this year
[2003] he completed his project. Starring Stephen Rea as the mock-heroic everyman Leopold Bloom, Angeline Ball, best remembered for her role as backup singer in The Commitments, as his carnal and cuckolding wife Molly, and Hugh O’Conor, who starred in Chocolat, as the young artist-intellectual Stephen Dedalus, Walsh’s film, simply titled Bloom, has already generated intense debate in Ireland” (Philip Watson, The Observer). “Writer-director Walsh puts some points up on the board for taking on James Joyce’s gargantuan über-text Ulysses at all, and some more for creating something even remotely comprehensible after compressing it into just under two hours” (The Guardian). “Where the film does succeed is in its capturing of the bawdiness and banality of Joyce’s novel, from Molly’s orgasmic morning daydreams to Leopold worrying about his piles ... The performances are credible too” (Rachel Cameron, BBC).
Colour, 35mm. 113 mins.