"Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen" or "The Forest for the Trees" is a German movie from 2003, so it will have its 15th anniversary soon. The title refers to a German play on words and I am not entirely sure how the English title gives the meaning too. The writer and director is Maren Ade and she is receiving a great deal of attention right now for "Toni Erdmann", but her work here shows that she also has made a couple semi-famous films earlier in her career. As most works from her, there is always a relatively young (around the age of 30) female character in the center of the story (just like "Alle anderen") and this one is played by Eva Löbau here. Löbau is fairly known here in Germany (at least the face) and she also worked with Quentin Tarantino for example already. For Ade, it was her first work as a director in terms of full feature length films, so it's probably not too surprising that the cast (except lead actress) is relatively unknown and honestly, Löbau is also not really a great star or talent, just physically very fitting for a certain type of characters like this one here maybe too.
She plays a teacher who comes to the city and the movie is basically about her struggles to adapt to the new environment and also cope with all the fairly difficult kids in her new class. Put in some notes from the private life of the character and you basically have exactly what you could expect here. This is what it is. I myself, however, was never really well-entertained while watching. I never had the impression that the character(s) or story about her/them actually warranted a movie. I am not criticizing that nothing spectacular happens and the film went for bleak realism obviously and that's perfectly fine for sure. But if you do, then you also need to make sure to deliver in terms of character development and story-telling and there were far from enough moments when this was true. Apart from that, I also found the acting underwhelming overall. I can say I am glad the film runs for 80 minutes only and that's fine because there's no need for a rookie filmmaker like Ade to go for something overlong, but even at this relatively low run time it dragged on a couple occasions. Thumbs down from me. Not recommended and Ade clearly stepped her game up in the years that followed afterward.
She plays a teacher who comes to the city and the movie is basically about her struggles to adapt to the new environment and also cope with all the fairly difficult kids in her new class. Put in some notes from the private life of the character and you basically have exactly what you could expect here. This is what it is. I myself, however, was never really well-entertained while watching. I never had the impression that the character(s) or story about her/them actually warranted a movie. I am not criticizing that nothing spectacular happens and the film went for bleak realism obviously and that's perfectly fine for sure. But if you do, then you also need to make sure to deliver in terms of character development and story-telling and there were far from enough moments when this was true. Apart from that, I also found the acting underwhelming overall. I can say I am glad the film runs for 80 minutes only and that's fine because there's no need for a rookie filmmaker like Ade to go for something overlong, but even at this relatively low run time it dragged on a couple occasions. Thumbs down from me. Not recommended and Ade clearly stepped her game up in the years that followed afterward.