Crime, comedy, drama or historical film – there is hardly a genre that Dominik Graf has not tried. An indefatigable, obsessed man who has already received many awards for his works.
Munich – When Dominik Graf stages a thriller, expectations are high and are usually not disappointed. The man from Munich masterfully knows how to tell stories about human abysses, including murder, in a complex, rapid and exciting way, just think of the “Tatort” episode “Frau Bu laughs” or the “Polizeiruf 110: Der Scharlachrote Engel”.
And he can do more than crime, as he proved once again in 2021 with the Erich Kästner film “Fabian or the Dog Walk”. One of the most important German filmmakers turns 70 on Tuesday (September 6th).
His gift: finding the unexpected in the supposedly boring and hackneyed. A skill that Graf used when he developed the evening series “Der Fahnder” for ARD, a few years after graduating from the University of Television and Film (HFF) in Munich. The challenge: to find corners far away from Munich’s bussi-bussi crowd that didn’t look like the postcard cliché.
Dirty and derelict places
This party life was not Graf’s world anyway. He preferred to look for dirty, dilapidated places, not a problem in the 1980s. The “Investigators” films were mostly shot around the main train station, “in establishments from which one could assume that the crime was at home,” he told the German Press Agency.
It’s hard to find something like that these days. “The will of the politicians to clean up the cities was so radical from the 1990s that the cities have completely lost their face at the most interesting points,” regrets Graf. “All things and places that took place outside of the regulated were taken away by the philistines in the city administrations with a thirst for cleanliness.”
An artistic family
Graf grew up in upper-class, culturally interested circumstances. His father was the theater and film actor Robert Graf, his mother Selma Urfer performed in the cabaret “Die Onion” and wrote novels. A sheltered family home and a stark contrast to the milieu in which Graf later set many of his works, with the driven in a restless world.
Graf discovered his love of crime fiction early on, through the gangster stories of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. “It was more like these seedy, Hollywood-style backyards, the California Sunshine State, where wealth and poverty are starkly opposed.” Locations that inspired him in his own films. “You had to try to move it to Munich, which has always had a bit of the California Sunshine State, at least in the cinema you can say that.”
A world of abysses
Graf appreciates the vitality of the offbeat: “It has interesting biographies that can constantly tip over. People who have abysses that are not always immediately apparent. It’s a world that forms an incredible number of variants, a darker and sharper mirror of what we also know in bourgeois life,” he says. And right in the middle: “this chameleon-like figure of the policeman”, “who takes the blame, who has to fight for what they have to uphold in terms of law and order, and who very often get involved in moral disputes with the institutions”.
The Munich native has been in the film business for more than 40 years. In addition to crime fiction, he also directed other genres, such as the comedy Doctor Knock, which won the Grimme Prize, or the historical film The Beloved Sisters. The actor Udo Kier (“Swan Song”) a possessed. “Not only do you shoot a lot and constantly over the years, no, you also change genres easily,” Kier praised his friend at an awards ceremony last fall. And that without revealing any reservations in his films. “They just crowd into the action and get dirty too.”
Words of praise, but Graf is not someone who likes to be celebrated. “I don’t think I have that much talent for it,” admits the filmmaker, who was in a relationship with director Sherry Hormann and Oscar winner Caroline Link and has a daughter with both of them. The Munich resident will still be celebrating his 70th birthday – “with my dear, close relatives, not that big, but beautiful”. dpa
