Oscar award-winning German film director Volker Schlondorff is in town. He arrived in Kigali on Sunday and will facilitate a filmmaking master class at the Kwetu Film Institute in Kagugu today, April 5. After the master class, his upcoming drama film, Return to Montauk will be screened.

Schlondorff is not only a friend of the Kwetu Film Institute; he is the initiator of the teaching and mentorship programme at the school.

The veteran filmmaker has an extensive filmography that spans over fifty years not only in his native Germany, but also France and the U.S.

In 1979, he won an Oscar award as well as a Palme d’or at that year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival for his film, The Tin Drum. The film is an adaptation of the novel by Nobel Prize winning author Gunter Grass.

Return to Montauk was shot over 25 days at original locations in and around New York, while for interior scenes the production team had to move to Berlin, Germany. The film has been selected to compete for the Golden Bear in the main competition section of the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.

Some of Schlondorff’s other popular films include; Young Törless, A Degree of Murder, The Morals of Ruth Halbfass , A Free Woman, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Coup de Grâce, The Circle of Deceit and Swann in Love, among others.

Schlondorff has been active ­­on the German film scene since the 1960s, when he was a member of the New German Cinema, a loose grouping of German filmmakers who set out to create smaller, more independent and artistically challenging films to investigate the state of contemporary German society.

In 1991, he was Head of the Jury at the 41st Berlin International Film Festival.

Schlöndorff also teaches film and literature at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

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