Back by Popular Demand!
of the movie to have a romance with
James Bond (the role Brosnan played
in four films)!"
If she says so, it must be true. Bier is
on a roll.
Her film After the Wedding was
nominated for an Academy Award in
2007, and her follow-up, In a Better
World, won the Best Foreign Language
Film Oscar and a Golden Globe in
2011.
And, yes, it is a big deal in
Denmark, "for everybody. It's like win-
ning the soccer World Cup. For a tiny
country, winning a big prize is impor-
tant. When we came back, there was a
lot of press waiting at the airport, and
the entire country was really proud"
The award is in no way a burden,
says Bier. "I never look at it that I have
to repeat that success. I never choose
projects based on what I did previ-
ously, but on what interests me and
excites me. I'm not a careerist. I need
to be intrigued" (Bier has already
completed her next film, Serena, a
Depression era-drama set in North
Carolina starring Bradley Cooper and
Jennifer Lawrence.)
Bier grew up a member of the
6,000-strong Copenhagen Jewish com-
munity, attending a Jewish school and
becoming a bat mitzvah.
"It was all right, though right now
in Europe there is a growing anti-
Semitism," she says. "When I was
a kid, it wasn't really there. I felt I
was different from my non-Jewish
friends, who were deeply physically
rooted in the country. My mother
was born there, but my father came
in 1943 from Germany. I think
today's younger kids feel slightly
more stigmatized:'
Synagogues in Copenhagen tend
toward Orthodoxy. "It's always been
a slight problem if you feel a cultural
Jewish identity but don't feel super-
religious," says Bier. "Then again, it's
not easy to be Jewish in Denmark
because there's no natural kind of
environment for you to be part of:'
It's more difficult now because of
the increased anti-Semitism — a
subject Bier does not want to go into
detail about, if only for safety rea-
sons.
All she says is: "It's sad. Very sad"
❑
66
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OlympiaEntertainment.com I The Box Office
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Love Is All You Need is
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Cinetopia from page 52
based on a true story of resistance
to the Third Reich, and The Other
Woman, which followed East German
spies.
Katz also wrote Remembrance, a
true story about a pair of lovers who
escape Auschwitz only to lose each
other in postwar Poland and reunite
30 years later.
A television miniseries profiling the
legendary theater couple from 1920s
Berlin — singer-actress Lotte Lenya
and composer Kurt Weill — also has
claimed Katz's attention. It began a
fascination with the people and culture
of that time, and she wrote a historical
novel, And Speaking of Love, based on
Lenya's life.
Katz currently is writing a nonfic-
tion book about the partnership of
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (writer
and composer of The Threepenny
Opera).
"I always wanted to work on films"
says Katz, 55, who went to Dartmouth
but learned screenwriting by watch-
ing movies and reading screenplays. "I
began with documentaries for about
10 years, and it was hard to make the
leap from that to larger films:'
Katz, who gained early filmmak-
ing experience working as a camera
assistant on a variety of large projects,
advises that a faster path can be found
through university training.
She is curious to see how the Arendt
film plays in America. It has been
doing well in Germany and France.
"Portraying Hannah Arendt during
the years when she generated con-
troversy about the character of Adolf
Eichmann was a way in which to por-
tray her own life" Katz explains about
the woman who had to leave Germany
for France because of her Jewish heri-
tage and then leave France.
"The controversy over the Eichmann
writing allows the audience to experi-
ence another time in which she was
going through exile, experiencing
loneliness in America.
"I think audiences will come away
with more information and a far more
nuanced view of what she was trying
to achieve through her work. I think
this story reveals a woman whose
life was both defined and derailed by
exile:' ❑
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55