DIE WAND/THE WALL (12) 2012   GERMANY    JULIAN PÖLSLER    £15.99
Martina Gedeck, best known for her performance in the Academy Award-winning film The Lives of Others, now stars in The Wall, a contemporary female Robinson Crusoe story.  Based on Marlen Haushofer’s best-selling eponymous novel from the 1960s, the film is a highly original exploration of the experience of solitude and survival.

Gedeck plays an unnamed Austrian woman who goes to a secluded Alpine hunting lodge with her cousin (Ulrike Beimpold) and the latter’s husband (Karl Heinz Hackl) who, shortly after their arrival, decide to visit the nearest village. When the couple does not return the next morning the woman sets out for the village and discovers an invisible wall, behind which there appears to be no sign of life. The wall now separates her from the rest of the world. Left behind with a dog, a cat and a cow, she must try to survive alone in the forest. She keeps a record of her thoughts, her fears and the hardship she suffers although nobody might ever read her outpourings. Martina Gedeck’s outstanding performance brings  the role to a rare and vivid intensity.

In German with English subtitles.

DVD available to buy at – http://www.worldonlinecinema.com/Home/german-films-on-dvd