Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

Few moments in modern history are more cinematic than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Start with the disbelieving expressions on the faces of East Berliners, having just cleared a barrier they could have been shot for approaching moments prior. Then you have the images of all Berliners celebrating astride the graffitied divide, joyfully destroying what kept them apart.

It’s fitting then that two decades on we look to the cinema this event inspired. To mark the 20-year anniversary of the wall's toppling, London’s Barbican Centre put together “Behind the Wall”, a two-weekend film programme that examined the Wall’s lasting political and cultural implications.

The series included Michael Ballhaus and Ciro Cappellari’s 2009 documentary "In Berlin". Instead of looking back, this film paints a picture of Berlin today. The cast solidifies the city's stereotype as a breeding ground for the arts, full of actors, authors, musicians, fashion designers, artists and architects. The only exceptions on screen are a personable Turkish shopkeeper and Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit (who, in one scene, must fend off a woman who is angry about the economic climate). Eclectic though they may be, these characters fail to elicit as much interest as the city itself. This seems to be the intent, as we get only glimpses of these lives as they unfold amid the streets of the German capital.   read more »

When German friends saw Mel Brooks’s famous slapstick musical some years ago in London, they found it extremely amusing but rued that it would never come to Germany. “The Germans came off so badly,” they explained.

The German version of "The Producers" has just opened in Berlin, and the location could not be better. The Admiralspalast, a newly reconstructed and refurbished variety theatre near Friedrichstrasse station, was once an operetta theatre that Hitler himself liked to visit.  read more »

“BEAU spectacle!” reports France’s Le Monde of a new production at Paris’s Bastille Opera. The choreographer inspiring this plaudit is called Waltz. Yes, that’s her real family name.

Sasha Waltz has been the toast-of-town in Berlin's dance world for a decade. Many of her shows, including perhaps her most famous, “Körper” (Bodies), have toured the world. Breaching the formidable walls of the Bastille is the 44-year-old German’s version of Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet”. It opened on October 5^th to extravagant applause, with another Paris daily, Libération, citing its “superb, fluid, aerial pas de deux”, performed by the Paris ballet’s stars, Aurélie Dupont and Hervé Dupont, as the star-crossed lovers.  read more »