Bachmann & Frisch

Hildegard von Bingen was truly a woman ahead of her time. A visionary in every sense of the word, this famed 12th-century Benedictine nun was a Christian mystic, composer, philosopher, playwright, poet, naturalist, scientist, physician, herbalist and ecological activist.

The former owner of a craftsman’s business, Wolfgang Kunert, who has been unemployed for a long time, is waiting at the job agency. When it is his turn after four hours of waiting and Heidi Ganz, the agent responsible for him, cannot offer him any work and points out his misconduct in general, he loses his nerves. He pulls out a gun and takes Mrs. Ganz hostage.

Serious, logical Martha (Barbara Sukowa) and dreamy, superstitious Anna (Stefania Sandrelli) have been best friends. That is, until Martha's lover Victor (Sami Frey) decides he'd rather be Anna's lover. Mortified, Martha flees to Africa, leaving the field clear for her ex-friend. When Anna comes down with cancer, she pleads with Victor to get her to come back and somehow put this rupture in their friendship behind them. Curiously, Martha does come back, and after some understandable tension and a few bitter words, they manage to reestablish their friendship, though it is now on a different basis.

Margarethe von Trotta's TV movie focuses on a woman whose life is destroyed by her addiction to alcohol. Angela Rinser is a happy mother of two children and quite successful in her job as bilingual secretary. The sudden death of her husband changes everything. She starts drinking and loses her job. Her children Felicitas and Max try to hush up their social decline for years because they don't want to live in a foster home.

After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss, crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF 2 in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland. The first episode was broadcast on November 29, 1970. The opening sequence for the series has remained the same throughout the decades, which remains highly unusual for any such long-running TV series up to date. Each of the regional TV channels which together form ARD, plus ORF and SF, produces its own episodes, starring its own police inspector, some of which, like the discontinued Schimanski, have become cultural icons. The show appears on DasErste and ORF 2 on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. and currently about 30 episodes are made per year. As of March 2013, 865 episodes in total have been produced. Tatort is currently being broadcast in the United States on the MHz Worldview channel under the name Scene of the Crime.

When Ruth's husband dies in New York, in 2000, she imposes strict Jewish mourning, which puzzles her children. A stranger comes to the house - Ruth's cousin - with a picture of Ruth, age 8, in Berlin, with a woman the cousin says helped Ruth escape. Hannah, Ruth's daughter engaged to a gentile, goes to Berlin to find the woman, Lena Fisher, now 90. Posing as a journalist investigating intermarriage, Hannah interviews Lena who tells the story of a week in 1943 when the Jewish husbands of Aryan women were detained in a building on Rosenstrasse. The women gather daily for word of their husbands. The film goes back and forth to tell Ruth and Lena's story. How will it affect Hannah?

Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.