Beyond Silence (1996)

"Jenseits der Stille" is an almost 20-year-old German movie by Caroline Link. This film here scored an Academy Award nomination, but lost to the Dutch entry. However, 5 years later Link triumphed ("Nirgendwo in Afrika") and she was pretty young back then as in 2015 she is 50 years old. The story here is simply. A girl has deaf parents and helps them with coping in everyday life as good as she can, but her ability to hear makes her long for a more meaningful life. She becomes a musician and longs for the support of her family, especially her dad's, but he cannot really accept and appreciate what his daughter does as he cannot hear it. He says in one scene that he would actually have preferred her to be deaf as well.During these roughly 105 minutes, we also meet some other family members and watch how the protagonist has to deal with the loss of a beloved person. The first 40 minutes or so are about the central character's life as a child and how she gets into playing the clarinet. The transformation from girl to woman (if you can say that) happens during a concert as there is a time jump of roughly 10 years. Sylvie Testud takes over at this point. She won a German Film Award for her performance here. If you have seen Marion Cotillard's Oscar winning turn in "La môme", you will have come across Testud there as well. That is possibly her most famous movie.Anyway, I have to say I enjoyed this film and there is really not much wrong with it. I especially enjoyed the first 45 minutes because the child actress Tatjana Trieb is very good and the writing is excellent there as well when we get to watch how she constantly interprets between her parents and everybody else or helps her mother in watching old romance movies. I did like the ending from an emotional perspective, but the reunion between her and her dad could have been even more effective if they had taken a more subtle approach. Even I was thinking that she finally needs to play during the audition instead of constantly talking to her father and ignoring the professors. There is a very successful French movie named "La famille Bélier" out right now and there are really quite a few parallels between these two films. If you saw this new film, give the old one "Jenseits der Stille" a chance as well. You will most likely not be disappointed. Also it has excellent music. Recommended.

i first saw this movie over 5 years ago when i was working at walt Disney world. after i first saw it i walked out of the theater in wonder... and the comments that i heard from others that saw it - they thought that it was just as good as i did!coming from a background in Deaf education i can tell you that German sign language and asl are not the same. they are similar however... enough for me to know most of what was being said after watching the movie for a while.i lived at a deaf school for a year and so to see the relationships between lara and her parents... well, let me tell you that was done quite nicely. and i just love the scene with tom and lara and the song 'i will survive'!! it made me laugh so hard!!!for a while after i saw the movie i looked to buy it. i could not find it anywhere for quite some time. i finally found it available online and bought it on VHS. yes, there is a soundtrack, as i have that as well.

Definitely a rare and wonderful find for a movie which includes a cast of REAL (instead of hired hearing-actor-pretending-as-a-deaf-person actors that you see sometimes in films!) deaf actors in the movie world nowadays.... Also, it's a bigger plus when you consider the directional approach chosen for this film -- it's an appreciative success.

As a German myself I know how bad usually German movies are. This one is one of the very very very few exceptions. What makes it an exception is: no overdoing morality, no sentimentality beyond realism, GOOD ACTORS (all of them newcomers, so nepotism didn't do it as in many other German movies), an original story. Is there a scent of dawn in German Filmindustry ?