FREE ON DAILYMOTION The Neverending Story

No movie ran better than The Neverending Story in our NOMADENKINO! Who would have thought it? Sure, our NOMADENKINO was founded to show experimental films that go down in the cinema with a portable 35mm projector. But not only! Our NOMADENKINO is something like a walking event. A cinema that appears in different venues like the Holzmarkt, About Blank or Klunkerkranich to show films there. And sometimes you just want a little nostalgia. When I saw The Neverending Story again after almost 30 years, I mainly noticed how great the film has aged. Were children's films ever so nihilistic before? The kingdom of fantasies is in great danger. But the enemy is neither an evil sorcerer nor any other tangible danger. The enemy is nothing. It spreads and threatens to wipe out fantasies. With nothing. Only the imagination of a little boy named Bastian (Barret Oliver) stands between the kingdom of fantasies and nothing. Bastian discovers fantasies in an old bookstore. There you don't meet him very friendly, but Bastian manages to steal the book of infinite history. A dangerous book - and suddenly Bastian realizes while reading that the characters in the never-ending story know HIM, Bastian. The story has come true! How is that possible? That's the first question Bastian asks himself. A truly modern and skeptical boy! But what should Bastian do? He opens the next page and it is the childlike empress (Tami Stronach) herself who asks him to give her a name to prevent fantasies from going down. For me, that was always the best thing about Michael Ende's Infinite Story: The idea of a story IN history. The other great idea is that a child's imagination is enough to stop the passage of fate. Faith in the imagination of the children that saves us all! There's a lot we believe in in The Never Ending Story. Much we GERNE believe, because this Bavaria production doesn't look like another Star Wars copy! Here a new world is really emerging before our eyes and today - after almost 30 years - it seems all the more romantic! The creatures of this world are dolls and I like them much better than today's animation techniques - precisely because they seem so beautifully unreal! Puppets are just as three-dimensional as the human characters in the film and that's what makes it look right again! Within the world of fantasies we meet the brave hero Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), who paves a way to the glass tower of the childlike empress. He must sneak past the Amazons up to the tower. Atreyu's story alone would have filled every other fantasy film, but not The Neverending Story. Michael Ende's novel is about the unfolding of this story and that's why we see Bastian turning the pages again and again, breathlessly. He, who was tormented by his classmates on his way to school, is now allowed to take part in Atreyu's adventures. The Never Ending Story is not a story that just happens. Bastian (and we) learn that every story is a never-ending act of fantasy! A never-ending act of storytelling! That's why we love the endless story so much that hardly any other performance of our open air nomadic cinema was allowed to welcome so many spectators! -