Director Odo Fluk says he began writing his new film, "Cologne 75," after another project he had developed in the United States collapsed. He turned to the story of Keith Jarrett’s famous 1975 Cologne concert, organized by a teenage girl who pretended she knew what she was doing, and performed on a damaged rehearsal piano. Fluk says the material felt less like straight jazz than punk rock, and he wanted to write the movie like music, improvising instead of relying on the usual screenplay outline process. He was also inspired by Geoff Dyer’s book "But Beautiful," which he describes as a jazz work in its own form.
Fluk writes that while he was in Berlin for the film’s press conference, he learned that his 88-year-old father was rapidly deteriorating. He joined a video call with his father and later with the family after the press event, when they discussed whether he should leave. They decided he should stay, even as he moved through two days of interviews for television, newspapers, and radio, repeating the same answers while trying to appear upbeat and enthusiastic about a film he describes as a feminist punk-rock work full of light, humor, and music.
His father died a few weeks later. During the seven-day mourning period, Fluk traveled again, this time to support the film’s rollout in German-speaking markets across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. He describes the experience as joyful in public and painful in the gaps between engagements, and says it forced him to think about whether he was doing the right thing by continuing the work.
Now, as "Cologne 75" prepares for its Israeli release, Fluk reflects that his father will never see it. He says much of his work was driven by wanting to make his father proud, and that the two are now inseparably connected, even though the film is bright and energetic while his father’s story is about death. He notes that his father never had a proper chance to watch it, and says that whatever he might have thought, he would probably have called it a good film.
