Fred Kelemen – Frost (1997)

adminNovember 25, 2019

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Frost is a landmark European film, cementing Fred Kelemen as an inheritor of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog. This three-hour epic 16mm film focuses on a mother and son fleeing her abusive husband in Berlin and wandering the former East Germany seeking a town that has long since vanished. Set during a sunless Christmas, Frost slowly unfolds during their one-week odyssey across glacial landscapes, towards peace. Introduced by the film critic Jonathan Romney.

One of the boldest German filmmakers of the last 20-years, critic Susan Sontag compared Kelemen’s “urgently relevant” work to Alexander Sokurov and Bela Tarr. He garnered attention for his 1990s trilogy – Fate, Frost and Nightfall. Believing in “time and not in speed”, meditations on human dissolution, cruelty and loneliness unfold at somnambulant pace. Set amongst Europe’s late-capitalist underclass of the unemployed and dispossessed, he captures nocturnal urban low-life with beauty.