COME WITH ME TO THE CINEMA – THE GREGORS

The director Alice Agneskirchner is available for interviews.

COME WITH ME TO THE CINEMA – THE GREGORS by Alice Agneskirchner will celebrate its world premiere in the Forum Special section of the 72. International Film Festival Berlin. This documentary by the award-winning director weaves together the life story of the visionary film curators Erika and Ulrich Gregor with the films they discovered and presented to the German audience – a journey through 70 years of film history.

As early as the 1950s, the Gregors initiated a discourse on film in post-war Germany and have been enriching German film culture with their work ever since. In 1963 they founded the Friends of the Deutsche Kinemathek, and in 1970, the famous Arsenal cinema. With the expansion of the Berlinale by the new section “International Forum of Young Cinema“ in the midst of a cultural-political crisis in 1971, they played a key role in saving the existence of the festival.

The film is set for German theatrical release in late summer 2022.

SYNOPSIS
A life without cinema is possible, but pointless. True to this motto, Erika and Ulrich Gregor have been traveling the world since 1957, finding unusual films and bringing them to Berlin. In an associative montage, film history, West German and contemporary Berlin history are combined with the present life of the Gregors and statements of many of their companions. Filmmakers such as Helke Sander, Jutta Brückner, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Rosa von Praunheim, Doris Dörrie, Michael Verhoeven, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Gerd Conradt and Volker Schlöndorff talk about the influence the Gregors had on them personally, painting a vivid picture of film culture, from the 1960s and 1970s through New German Cinema to international Independent classics. Footage and film clips from 40 films such as The Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol, The Match Factory Girl by Aki Kaurismäki, Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, Red Sun by Rudolf Thome or Hungerjahre by Jutta Brückner form a broad framework, at the center of which are Erika and Ulrich Gregor. They take us on a journey through 70 years of cinema history, gaining insights into the everyday life of this important film couple, who have been married for more than 60 years and who still work together every day – true to Bertolt Brecht’s motto: „Who lives, say not, never“.

Alice Agneskirchner was born in Munich and studied at the Babelsberg Film Academy before the Fall of the Wall. Her first film Raulien’s Revier won the Directing Award of the Film Schools and the Golden Hugo in Chicago in 1995. In 2011, for 20 x Brandenburg, she received her first Grimme Award as one of twenty filmmakers involved. An Apartment in Berlin screened at DOK-Leipzig 2013, Dok-Fest München 2014 and at numerous international film festivals, e.g. MJFF- Portland/USA 2014. For the television documentary How HOLOCAUST Came to Television, Alice Agneskirchner was again honored with the prestigious Grimme Award in 2020. In 2015, she received an artist fellowship from Villa Aurora Los Angeles. The box office success Auf der Jagd – Wem gehört die Natur premiered at the 2017 Hof Film Festival and Lampenfieber celebrated its world premiere as a Berlinale Special Gala in 2019. The director is a member of the German Film Academy and the German Television Academy.

COME WITH ME TO THE CINEMA – THE GREGORS is produced by Ehlermann & Agneskirchner Filmproduktion. Co-producers are the rbb Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (Rolf Bergmann) and WDR Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Andrea Hanke). The film is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media (BKM), Medienboard Berlin- Brandenburg, and German Federal Film Fund (DFFF).

Production Company: Ehlermann & Agneskirchner Filmproduktion

German Distributor: Real Fiction Filmverleih

155 min. / 1,85:1 / 5.1 / Germany 2022 / color