Retro Sundance: 1999's Run Lola Run
Team Experience is looking back on past Sundance winners since we aren't attending this year. Here's Manuel on a late 90s German flick...
Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) won the 1999 Audience Award (World Cinema) at Sundance in 1999, an early accolade that would make it one of the most critically acclaimed foreign films of the year, a notion more than cemented close to a year later, when it would win the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film, a BAFTA nomination and seven aptly titled Lola (German Film) Awards. In case you’re wondering, Germany didn’t submit Tykwer’s film as its Foreign Language Oscar entry—they went instead with the lesbian Nazi film Aimée & Jaguar, which failed to make the cut with the Academy who eventually bestowed the prize on Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother.
I hadn’t revisited it since I first caught way back in college and all I could remember was its propulsive storytelling and near-frantic filmmaking. And really, on second viewing, that remains the film’s most distinctive feature...