‘Köln 75’ Actress Mala Emde Jazzes It Up

When she was 16, Mala Emde liked to hang out in jazz bars and talk to strange men.

“I was a weird teenager,” says the German actress, now 28. “I think I was just scared of everything people my age were doing. There was something comforting for me in going to a jazz bar and talking to older, more experienced people about this music I knew nothing about.”

These days, when it comes to jazz, Emde can hold her own. In Köln 75, which has its world premiere on Feb.16 at the Berlin Film Festival as part of the Berlinale Special lineup, she plays the real-life Vera Brandes, another weird teenager with a taste for jazz bars. At 18, Brandes organized a concert in Cologne for jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. The recording of Jarrett’s totally improvised performance became the best-selling solo jazz album of all time and the best-selling piano recording ever.

The story of how that concert (almost didn’t) happen is the story of Köln 75. John Magaro plays Jarrett, but Köln 75 is Emde’s film. Director Ido Fluk (The Ticket) shifts the focus to Brandes’ backstory, how this teenage daughter of a dentist became a pivotal figure in the history of jazz.

It’s a star-making role for Emde, who plays Brandes as an irresistible force of nature, a chain-smoking, free-loving rebel desperate to escape the middle-class conformity she was born into. “I can’t imagine anyone saying no to you,” says saxophonist Ronnie Scott (Daniel Betts), asking Brandes to organize his next tour.

“Vera is amazing. The character was really fun to play because we’re similar in a lot of ways, but Vera is so much more rigid, determined,” says Emde. “When you say ‘No!’ she says ‘Yes!’ and then she does it.”

This being a ’70s movie, the costumes play a major role. Emde as Vera tears across Cologne in red leather boots, a Shearling jacket thrown over a bright yellow top and green miniskirt, her Indian bead purse swinging wildly.

“When we did the costume fittings, I didn’t even need to look in the mirror, I just felt how I moved in the clothes, it felt right for Vera,” says Emde. “The ’70s are just inspiring. It was so different in the ’70s because it felt there was a real belief that art can change something — without teaching, just by opening your eyes. There was such a big hope, and I feel like my generation has totally lost that hope.”

Köln 75 touches on the politics of the 1970s — feminism, sexual liberation, social revolt — but only in passing as a backdrop to the story of Brandes and Jarrett. It’s a bit of a shift for Emde, who has made her name with roles where the political message was front and center (as the teenage Anne Frank in 2015’s My Daughter Anne Frank or an Antifa activist in 2020’s And Tomorrow the Entire World.

“Some people say I’m secretly taking political science classes through the characters I play, but it’s not a conscious thing, it just happens,” she says. “Sometimes when you read a script, you have the feeling: I need to take this on. It’s not about want — it’s about I need to do this.”

Emde says the political shift in Germany toward the far-right — the anti-immigrant AfD party is running second in national polls ahead of the Feb. 23 election — has made her reassess work like And Tomorrow the Entire World, in which she plays a law student who becomes radicalized to fight a group of white supremacists in her small town.

“When we shot this movie like five years ago, it was still about neo-Nazis, skinheads, like in the ’90s, but the right-wing movement today has moved right to the middle of our society,” she notes. “So how we attack these issues has to change. We can’t present this as something apart from us. The person voting far-right these days could be your neighbor.”

Emde isn’t putting politics and serious drama behind her. Asked for the directors with whom she’d most want to work, she name-checks Ira Sachs and “my absolute favorite Andrea Arnold — I watched Fish Tank over and over when I was 12, which was maybe not healthy” — but says she is keen to avoid making “didactic or social realist movies where the message is more important than the art. I really just want [to use art] to grow the limits of empathy.”

And she’s enjoying flexing her comedic muscles. Much of Köln 75 plays like a rom-com, and Emde’s gotten praise for her turn in Oh Hell, a popular German streaming series, in which she plays Helena, a 20-something hot mess.

“When I first started acting, I really wanted to do dramatic roles,” she says. “But right now I really love playing idiots.”