Bye-Bye Bavaria!
A cult figure who has risen very quickly to the top of the New German Cinema in the past 2 or 3 years, Herbert Achternbusch is a poet-novelist-dramatist-filmmaker who singlehandedly restored “Bavarian Cinema” to the heights it enjoyed in the merry heyday of Karl Valentin. According to the Toronto Film Festival:
“Achternbusch is an original talent - each of his films is autobiographical, chaotically springing from movies he's seen and experiences he's had. The Bavarian specializes in the everyday and the possibility of the banal threatening a catastrophe tantamount to Judgment Day.
“Bye-Bye Bavaria! reveals the self-styled poet-poacher displeased with his Bavarian homeland. Poaching no longer holds any pleasure for him, his lover leaves him for a huntsman, a newspaper reporter is hot on his trail and he has lost his poetic gift. He retreats to Greenland with a myriad of followers anxious to confront the poet in this visually beautiful exile, and in the end they all perish amid the beauty of the icebergs.
“The remarkable power of this film is the put-down of so many sacred cows and art-blisters on the German cultural scene. The end effect is a feeling for tragi-comedy: an author reduced to an art-object who can't live at home anymore.”