Edgar Reitz
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Follow-up to the TV trilogy "Heimat", this time for cinemas, set again in the fictional village Schabbach in the Hunsrück region of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Lulu, the daughter of musician Hermann Simon, is looking for something she feels is missing from her life. She delves into the past and is transported to the lives of her ancestors via dreamlike sequences that show the hopes and realities of her female relations over the course of an entire century. Heimat Fragments is an intoxicating trip into the lives of venerable characters from different periods in Lulu's family history, from long-forgotten scenes of war to every day family life on the farm. This gripping film shows fragments of the lives that shaped her own. Her gaze into the past does not simply signal the end of her youth, it means the beginning of a newly gained freedom.
A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring some of its greatest directors.
In this eleven-part film made for TV, Reitz portrays his country's difficult history from 1919 to the present day without recourse to soap operatics. Maria, born in 1900, is the still point around whom others move emotionally, economically, and politically, with the narrative developing through a superbly sustained accumulation of detail. Humane and comic, it's very finely acted, exact in period detail, and immaculately photographed in monochrome with occasional bursts of colour of an epiphanic resonance. A magnificent achievement that will reward every hour it demands of your time.
A documentary about the Hunsrück (an area in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany) and its people.
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
The true story of the Bavarian Tailor Albrecht Berblinger who, after a strange encounter with a balloon starts building a flying machine. Although not an engineer by profession, he never gives up. No matter how many obstacles are put in his way nor how many failures he endures, his ardour is never dampened. He continues with his dream to fly like a bird.
Combining fictional and documentary modes, Kluge's In Danger and Dire Distress... takes a critical stance toward Frankfurt's public sphere and urban redevelopment. Despite the serious formal and political concerns of the film, Kluge's heightened sense of the absurd safeguards a reserve of utopian optimism.
Two women during WW2 living in a Hunsrück village embark on a trip to Vienna.
Eleven-year old Jason and his companions, including Hercules and Orpheus, go with the ship "Argo" in the search for the Golden Fleece. With wit and cunning to overcome various obstacles until they reach the destination of their fantastic journey. The experiment is not only due to the popularization or naive glorification of a myth, but the search space occupied by fact that the heroes of antiquity were actually very young.
The Dumpster Kid is an artistic creation: in every story society forces her to learn something. But she, fully grown from the moment of her birth, unquestionably learns more than is called for. This extra knowledge, which is not wanted by society, regularly brings her into danger. Dumpster Kid dies in each story, and across each genre. Her stories are set in a whole range of different time periods. What is a Dumpster Kid?
Kluge’s short-film starring his sister/muse Alexandra.
Documentary by Wilhelm Roth about the state of affairs of the Young German Cinema.
Elizabeth is a young woman who seeks happiness excessively burning out all those around her.
A young German woman search for happiness, liberation, and independence in the illusive wake of a transformative national recovery.
Documentary, trying to catch up with the latest developments in the field of communication.
