A still from <i>The Young Karl Marx</i>. August Diehl (right) as Karl Max with Stefan Konarske as Friedrich Engels.
PICTURE / MICHAEL MCDONNELL
A still from <i>The Young Karl Marx</i>. August Diehl (right) as Karl Max with Stefan Konarske as Friedrich Engels.
PICTURE / MICHAEL MCDONNELL
The Young Karl Marx (Der junge Karl Marx) Public screening: Monday, May 13, 7pm Davis Theatre, Whanganui Regional Museum Directed by Raoul Peck • France/Belgium/Germany • 2017 118 mins • M violence • In German, French and English, with English subtitles
An engrossing, classically conceived biopic about how Karl Marx, as a struggling familyman, and Friedrich Engels, the son of wealthy industrialist, came to create The Communist Manifesto.
Screening courtesy of the Goethe Institut Members free, public welcome by donation. More info: www.whanganuifilmsociety.org.nz
Synopsis At 26, Karl Marx embarks with his wife Jenny on the road to exile. In Paris in 1844 they meet young Friedrich Engels, son of a factory owner, who's studied the sordid beginnings of the English proletariat. Engels, somewhat of a dandy, brings Karl Marx the missing piece to the puzzle that composes his new vision of the world.
Together, between censorship and police raids, riots and political upheavals, they will preside over the birth of the labour movement, which until then had been mostly makeshift and unorganised. This will grow into the most complete theoretical and political transformation of the world since the Renaissance — driven, against all expectations, by two brilliant, insolent and sharp-witted young men from good families.
NZIFF review: "Raoul Peck, director of the masterful James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, has described Baldwin and the revolutionary socialist Karl Marx as "the two feet I stand on ... They frame who I am, my way of thinking and the way I analyse society". Peck's equally striking film about Marx is a handsomely mounted historical drama — and political argument — based largely on the letters exchanged between 1843 and 1850 by Marx (August Diehl) and Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske).
The film charts their personal lives and the course of their friendship and ideological brotherhood from a first wary meeting until the eve of the drafting of the Communist Manifesto. Reconstructing the conditions of the industrial age that made Europe ripe for their radical programme, it tacitly evokes contemporary parallels. The densely packed screenplay, co-written with Pascal Bonitzer, reanimates their arguments with fervour, clarity and the colour of their personal histories." - NZIFF 2017
Raoul Peck is a director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Haiti, he was raised in Congo, in the US and in France. He then studied Economic Engineering at the TU Berlin and the DFFB Berlin. Peck served as Haiti's Minister of Culture in 1996 and 1997, and since 2010 he has been the president of La Fémis in Paris, the famous film and television school. In 2001, the Human Rights Watch Organization awarded him with the Irene Diamond Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as jury member at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, as well as jury member at the Berlinale in 2002.
