Casts & Crew
Christian Quadflieg
Ulrike Kriener
Bernadette Heerwagen
Ulrike Grote
Dietmar Mues
Also Directed by Rolf Schübel
This quiet comedy by screenwriter Arndt Stüwe - reminiscent in style and tone of Billy Wilders "The Apartment" - Rolf Schübel staged emotionally and attractively with Bernadette Heerwagen and Wotan Wilke Möhring: a heart-warming Christmas love.
Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.
Between 1962 and 1966, sex murderer Jurgen Bartsch cruelly tortured and killed four children in an old air raid bunker in Germany. This documentary examines the personality of the killer who died in 1976 during voluntary castration surgery at the age of 30. Vilified by the press for his heinous crime, Bartsch also became a case study for famous found criminal psychologists like Alice Miller (who maintains that no one abuses without being abused as a child, and murderers tend to have their own childhood abuse denied by the adults around them). Bartsch never met his birth parents, he was raised in a clinic and later adopted by a cold, unaffectionate couple. By the age of 15, he tortured and killed his first child victim. This informative, fact-filled documentary provides enough details for viewers to come away with a broader understanding of the nature of the criminally insane and society's role in their formation.
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.
Based on the autobiographical notes by Leonhard Lentz the film tells the story of a man who was diagnosed with throat cancer. Besides the progress of the desease this film also focuses on the emotions and insights of the protagonist while being in therapy.
January / February 1993 marked the 50th anniversary of the German surrender at Stalingrad. On the occasion of this anniversary, a television documentary was produced in German-Russian cooperation, which, following a classic documentary pattern, allows 6 contemporary witnesses, former opponents of the war, to recount their personal experiences in front of the camera.
The story of the first cloned human being - told in her own words: At the age of thirty the world-famous composer Iris Sellin learns that she has an incurable illness. She - a person who wanted to live for ever - does however not give in. In order to preserve her art and also herself, beyond death, for all posterity, she has herself cloned. Her daughter Siri, whom, in this way, she turns into her virtual twin, learns as a child that she is the world's first cloned human being. In fact a blueprint: a blueprint of her mother. From that moment on nothing is as it was before...