Five Can’t-Miss Movies at the 2023 Oldenburg Film Festival

Scott Roxborough
·3 min read
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For three decades, the Oldenburg Film Festival has been devoted to celebrating independent cinema outside the mainstream of both Hollywood and the international art-house market.

For its 30th edition, which runs through Sunday, festival founder and artistic director Torsten Neumann continues to highlight weird, extreme and cutting-edge indie movies from around the world.

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Here are five can’t-miss movies from the 2023 crop.

The Wait

The Wait
The Wait

After the success of his debut film Before the Fall (2008), Spanish director Javier Gutiérrez followed Hollywood’s call and directed Rings (2017), the third entry in The Ring horror franchise. Despite grossing $83 million at the box office, the film was considered a flop, and Gutiérrez returned to Spain, spending six years developing his third feature, which will have its world premiere in Oldenburg. The raw drama, about a hardscrabble family whose life slowly descends into a nightmare, looks like a return to form for one of Europe’s most promising young filmmakers.

Passenger C

Passenger C
Passenger C

Part high-altitude thriller, part behind-the-scenes Hollywood industry docu-drama, this black-and-white feature, the directorial debut of indie producer and talent agent Cassian Elwes (Dallas Buyers Club, Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Mudbound), chronicles Elwes’ real-life encounter with an unruly passenger on a JetBlue red-eye from New York to Los Angeles and the surprising, traumatic aftermath that would transform both men.

Charcoal

'Charcol'
Charcoal

An overlooked gem of last year’s festival season, Carolina Markowicz’s feature debut (which premiered in Toronto and San Sebastian) follows a desperately poor family in rural Brazil taking in an unusual lodger: an Argentine crime lord who has faked his own death and needs to lie low for a while. Both suspenseful thriller and biting black comedy, the film features a stand-out, star-making performance from Maeve Jinkings as Irene, the mother struggling to hold her nuclear family together, whatever it takes.

The Nothingness Club

The Nothingness Club
The Nothingness Club

Another overlooked highlight of this year’s festival season is Edgar Pêra’s surreal, experimental and deliberately multi-fractured look at the world and life of surreal, experimental and multi-fractured Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under some 75 different “heteronyms,” fully fleshed-out fictional personas with their own distinct histories, literary styles and life philosophies. The cult director of Magnetick Pathways and O Barão imagines Pessoa’s many literary personalities as a noirish world of smoky bars and femme fatales where the greatest threat comes from the increasingly violent and deranged Álvaro de Campos (one of Pessoa’s most famous nom de plumes).

Uppercut

Ving Rhames in 'Uppercut'
Ving Rhames in Uppercut

Oldenburg’s 2023 closing night film is director Torsten Ruether’s own U.S. remake of his German-language debut Leberhaken, which premiered in Oldenburg in 2021. For the American version, Reuther has transferred his boxing film to New York and signed on Mission: Impossible star Ving Rhames to play a disillusioned former boxer who gets a shot at redemption when a young woman shows up at his gym, begging him to train her. The woman is portrayed by Leberhaken star Luise Großmann, reprising her role from the original film.

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