Hannes Stelzer
Berlin students Ben, Jonas, Leo, Ozzi and Sophie are on a class trip to "boring" Hildesheim. Their schedule includes visiting the medieval cathedral and witnessing a complete solar eclipse, but destiny intervenes… A bomb goes off at the cathedral and the students are evacuated by the police, only to find themselves in the clutches of an occult secret society calling themselves the Lunaris Cult, who aim to use an ancient pagan artifact, the Irminsul, to harness the vital force of their teenage captives and use it for their own purposes on the eclipse. The evil cultists are after immortality and divine power, and are even prepared to sacrifice the friends' lives. Ben and his gang manage to escape. Chased from one danger to the next, the cultists pursue them, closing in on them more and more. The fanatics have it all planned out, it seems, leaving nothing to chance. They disable the cell phone networks and satellite connections, leaving the friends to fend for themselves...
Adam Neumann is a member of a Jewish family living in Berlin. His grandfather, who has Alzheimer, is the head of this family and he had to leave the business because of his condition. The old man says that Adam is the reincarnation of a messiah and this unwelcome ideas start to bother the family. Adam becomes increasingly paranoid and gradually embarks on a spiritual quest, questioning his own reality. By accident or perhaps by chance, he reaches the beaches of Tulum, encountering the natural beauty of a place that will change his destiny.
When you read the title ‘Summer on the Balcony’ you probably think it will be a light Berlin summer comedy but it’s not. This film is an intimate study of two women friends who come to each other because of troubles with everyday life and with men and thus try to enjoy a life based on their ideas.
A group of young people draws straws to see who'll steal some cigarettes. With this theft, Sebastian starts a bizarre, symbolic odyssey through a sclerotic world, in search of himself and of truth and justice. When he tries withdrawing from one social paradigm, he finds himself caught in another.
Jonas and Ines are in love and want to spend their vacation together camping on the Baltic coast. But Ines’s narrow-minded parents intervene and insist that the young couple joins the family vacation. Problems arise, so everyone ends up traveling to the Bulgarian Black Sea on their own. Along the way, Jonas meets a beautiful Dutch girl who is going to India via Turkey…
After a fierce argument Steffi Zinn′s husband leaves the joint flat and stays away from home over night. The next morning, his wife Steffi has disappeared and is reported as a missing person. Captain Lohm takes over the case and at first looks for signs of a murder, but to no avail. Then, Steffi′s body is found in a lake. After her funeral, a stranger who had attended Steffi′s funeral for a short time is also found dead in a lake, and the connection between the two cases becomes apparent.
Teens in a holiday-camp. First love, first sex, first self-made theatre performance of "Romeo and Julliet" - quite interesting to have a look at the east-German youth in the seventies.
After a wolf had killed a sheep in their village, 12-year old Roland and his friend Hugo keep track of the predator. Roland wants to build a trap to capture the wolf alive. His father, on the other hand, wants to kill the animal with the hunting collective. Thus, father and son become rivals. Whereas his father takes leave from his job to lie in wait for the wolf, Roland ditches school and tinkers with his trap.
Young lieutenant Riedel, the leader of a motorized unit of NVA riflemen, is always concerned about his men. Thus, he is all the more happy that everything is running smoothly with the new recruits when he returns from his honeymoon. It seems to him that lance corporal Weißenbach, who is not only the oldest of the men but also a formidable armoured personnel carrier driver, has been a reliable stand-in for him. Thus, Riedel is all the more surprised when he learns that Weißenbach boosts the squad's performance with partly questionable methods.
The five-part feature, based on the novel by Helmut Sakowski, focuses on the friendly but also rival relationship between Druskat and the self-righteous Max Stephan, an old pal with different attitudes towards life and socialism . Druskat came to Mecklenburg as a refugee after World War II, became an integral part of the community, but also repeatedly caused a stir. Since the death of his wife he lives only with his daughter Anja, although there were enough women who wanted to be with him. Now he´s chairman of the LPG, the "volutary" federation for agriculture and animal husbandry. One evening, two men from the public prosecutor's office come to pick him up. He seems prepared, but Anja doesn't know why. Her first way leads her to Max Stephan, LPG chairman in the neighboring village. She happened to be there during the last argument between them, Max threatened to literally destroy Daniel. Did he carry out this threat? In conversations with the villagers, she gradually learns the truth.
German film about Luftwaffe pilots. It depicts a love triangle involving two of them being overcome by their participation in battle together.
Nazi cinema produced numerous WW2 military epics, one of the most impressive of which is Ufa's first-rate 1941 production, Uber Alles in der Welt,directed by Karl Ritter (Stukas). Ritter customarily produced morale-building propaganda pictures, and this, his first propaganda film to deal with the war, as well as his finest effort, was one of the highest-grossing pictures of the Third Reich. Set largely in France, England, and Spain, the film chronicles the plight of Germans caught by the outbreak of war and their frantic attempts to return to the Fatherland to join the battle. All of Germany's enemies receive equal disdain. The British, the French, the Poles, and the Jews are portrayed respectively as warmongers, profiteers and cowards. In the end, all that is important is returning to Germany.
A sculptor, an enemy of modern art, sets an example. He sculpts a statue of Venus in the style of the Greek antiquity and buries it in a forest. When it's dug up in 1930, it's considered to be a 2 000 year old, antique statue.
Der Herrscher (The Sovereign) was based on Before Sunset, a play by Gerhart Hauptmann. The great Emil Jannings stars as Mathias Clausen, a self-made businessman who is forced to do a great deal of soul-searching when his wife unexpectedly dies. Determining to start life anew, he falls in love with his secretary Inken (Marianne Hoppe) and impulsively takes a vacation to Italy. Clausen's selfish grown children, not wishing to share their father's affections -- nor his money -- with his new wife-to-be, go to court demanding that Clausen be declared mentally incompetent. Upon finding this out, Clausen flies into a rage, leaving the audience to wonder whether or not he really as gone off his trolley. Der Herrscher was directed by Veit Harlan, more famous (or notorious) for his viciously anti-Semitic Jud Suess (1940).
The famous tightrope artist Truxa is drinking at the Artisan bar in New York. He meets a young man, Husen, and gives him his stage name Truxa. He is to take the real Truxa's place at a circus show in Wintergarten, Berlin. Alternate-language version, or remake, filmed in the UK and released in 1938 as STAR OF THE CIRCUS (q.v.)
This film is a fascinating showcase for Emil Janning's theatrical play. He's a gentle school teacher who believes in his boys and is easily fooled about all things, while the other town officials want him dismissed. Curiously it's very hard to see what the film is exactly aiming for. Disaster strikes and the lax prof proves to be too far removed of the real problems of the world, on the other hand his enemies are shown in the most unsympathetic, satirical way denouncing the militaristic, bourgeois ideology of the Kaiserreich.
