Won LUX award

http://www.luxprize.eu

http://www.luxprize.eu/news/10-films-2016-lux-film-prize-official-selection-have-been-revealed-today-51st-karlovy-vary

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https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/review-toni-erdmann-saboteur

Of all the prizes Toni Erdmann has been awarded so far, the LUX Prize, given out by the European Parliament to those “films that go to the heart of European public debate” is the most fitting and paradoxical at the same time. Fitting because Maren Ade's film is the film that has finally captured the existential crisis of a continent that welcomes the free flow of capital but not that of its casualties. Paradoxical because the European Parliament, an extra-democratic institution with no effective powers, is symbolically responsible for having turned Europe from a union of welfare states, to an expendable offshoot of the global financial market. The choreography of the film is in fact the plastic outcome of a business plan gone astray, a business plan some still refer to as the European Union.
Purged from the iconographic stereotypes only Woody Allen can be excused to still associate Europe with, Toni Erdmann represents the first pertinent formulation of what a truly European cinema could look and feel like. A cinema that doesn't hide in the festival circuit and its self-referential irrelevance, but that looks in the eyes the ongoing catastrophe of a continent squeezed between neoliberal radicalization and a resurgent fascism.