Film Challenges Social Norms, Teaches Language

German language students attended a German film festival on February 3 in order to view the German film Auf Augenhöhe (At Eye Level). The movie was sponsored by the Goethe Institute and was shown in the Castro theater located in San Francisco, a historic landmark over 100 years old.

German teacher David Blumberg said, “I think they all enjoyed seeing the German film and they enjoyed the movie theater especially. It’s a really amazing historic theater.”

The Castro theater is one of the few remaining theaters from the 1900’s that is still in operation. The walls are decorated with colorful murals and mirrors laced with gold paint. According to the Castro Theater webpage, the theater’s intricate interior has origins from all around the world, including Spain and Italy. The Castro Theater regularly hosts film festivals and foreign movies.

“I loved the Castro theater. I’ve actually been there a couple of times…it’s really cool. I like the different architecture inside and the way that it’s set up. It’s a really pretty theater,” said sophomore Claire Sebree.

The Goethe Institute is a non-profit organization that promotes the study of German culture and language worldwide with its 159 institutes set up all over the world. “They paid for the screening of the movie so we didn’t have to pay anything to get into the movie theater,” said Blumberg.

According to Blumberg, past films screened at the festival, such as Das Wunder von Bern and Vitus, were so good that he has shown them to his students at school in subsequent years.

Auf Augenhöhe is about a young boy in a typical German school who reunites with his long-lost father, who happens to be a dwarf. Son and father struggle to connect and struggle against social stereotypes.

Blumberg said, “It had a good message, tolerance and understanding for people that are different than the norm. It had a nice development of the relationship between a father and a son.”

Sophomore Jasmine Xiong said, “I liked how their relationship got better over time as the boy learned to not care what other people think, and that’s really important today.”

“At first I thought it was going to be kind of weird because it was about a dwarf,” said Sebree, “It’s kind of a weird prospect but then it ended up being actually really interesting, and the different themes that are in all father-son movies kind of came through in their own way.”

The primary purpose of the trip was for students to engage with the language they are studying in Blumberg’s class. “It was great to see a film that was in German and have my students exposed to hearing so much German. The German in the film was pretty straightforward and easy to understand,” Blumberg said.

“You got immersed in it more than just being taught from a book,” said Sebree of the German spoken in the film.