Isolde Barth
Four weeks ago, the members of the Ostfildern Oasis building community moved into their building and the foundation has to be re-excavated due to a sealing problem. An even bigger problem emerges: an unidentifiable female corpse. Thorsten Lannert and Sebastian Bootz try to find their way between group meetings and expressions of feelings by the residents in order to obtain clues about the identity of the dead.
When 22-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder storms the stage of a small, progressive theatre in Munich 1967, and seizes the production without further ado, nobody suspects this brazen young rebel to become one of the most important post-war German filmmakers. Despite early setbacks, many of his films breakout at the most renowned films festivals and polarise audience, critics and filmmakers alike. His radical views and self-exploitation, as well as his longing for love, have made him one of the most fascinating film directors of this time.
The true story of a journalist who investigates the backgrounds of the Oktoberfest terror attack of 1980.
A family of a German linguist lives with an indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea.
This absolutely top-notch documentary by Robert Fischer is a fascinating look back at not just the film in question, but Fassbinder's meteoric career which ended all too soon with his untimely death. Archival footage of Fassbinder is utilized (including several fascinating snippets culled from interviews he did at the disastrous Cannes premiere of Despair), as well as many others involved in the film and its release. Even if you're not a particular fan of Despair, or even in fact of Fassbinder, this is stellar documentary film making and is an intriguing look at one of the most enigmatic masters of the New German Cinema.
A hard-working young man meets and falls in love with his sister's bridesmaid. He soon finds out how disturbed she really is.
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?
With a pounding heart, the horse madman Martina Kilian awaits the wedding with the glamorous jumping rider Arndt Graf Solm-Weltingen. When the Count hangs up the cavalry just before the marriage to enter the catering business of his future parents-in-law, Martina painfully notes that Arndt is not the man of their dreams. While the wedding preparations are in full swing, Martina falls in love with sympathetic veterinarian Erik.
Anna, married to the lawyer Rainer, despite all remorse, begins a liaison with the charming pharmaceutical representative Lars - fortunately the husband of her friend Bettina. Their meeting in a luxury hotel has fatal consequences: Anna and Lars are ear-witnesses of a supposed murder on the head of a call girl ring. Mistakenly, Anne's brother Max was suspected of doing something. Bettina, who has useful contacts due to her thriving wellness center, ensures that Max is released on bail. However, to acquit him they need Anna's statement - which would inevitably reveal her affair with Lars. So there has to be another solution...
Chronicle about Germany's most extraodinary literary family.
A mystery set in the environs of Lausanne concerning several plots which wind their way through the elegant homesteads of a couple of well-heeled French-Swiss denizens. Mika is the couture-attired, oh-so-perfect head of Muller Chocolates--a company that manufactures Swiss chocolates. Andre is her suave, concert pianist husband whose first wife died years ago in a mysterious car accident. When Jeanne, a beautiful young woman, enters the home of Mika and Andre, raising questions about her possible relationship to the family, tensions mount, alliances shift, and all the while, Mika prepares and faithfully serves her special recipe for hot chocolate each evening.
Africa, December 1916. Despite disobeying orders, Indy is promoted to Captain after capturing a German machine gun. He is then ordered to cross the jungle with Remy and Captain Boucher to pick up a shipment of weaponry. Along the way his Ubangan Sgt, Barthelemy picks up the sole surviving child from a disease ridden village despite Boucher's orders against it. On the way back, Indy and company succumb to disease themselves, and are picked up by Albert Schweitzer and the orderlies from his jungle hospital. At first resistant to being treated by a German, Indy soon begins to realize that Schweitzer is not interested in war, only attempting to cure people against all odds.
Time of darkness. Time of fire kindled against cold and fear. During the Holy Night, the seven year old Micha has to escape with his young mother Marianne from the violence of his drunken father... During their one week odyssey through frozen Germany, mother and son meet people to offer them shelter... Crushed by their own poverty, or dominated by their feelings of being lost, these people just hurt them deeper and they can be nothing other than stations of their continuous escape
Boro's adventure begins in Paris in the late twenties. As a minor employee in a photographic agency, he works for a pittance. However, thanks to his love of life, his handsome appearance and his appeal to women, he leads a varied and turbulent life. In spite of his numerous affairs, the great love of his life is his cousin, Maryika, the famous actress from Berlin. When Boro learns that Maryika is expected in Munich for the premiere of her latest film, he decides to visit her there. Boro is disappointed in his meeting with Maryika; he has to spend the night alone on the couch.
A complex and enigmatic plot that evokes the life of Bachmann. The story develops around an unusual triangular relationship, a threesome between a woman of unknown name, a man named Malina and a Hungarian, Ivan, with whom she falls in love. Ivan will be his last great love, but their need for exclusivity in love is so strong that it can not be understood or matched. Malina is a struggle, a confrontation between two worlds strange and hostile.
The passion of Christ, based on J. S. Bach's "Johannes-Passion". Its mix of music, speech, dancing and singing re-creates the style of antique Greek tragedies.
Expatriate Henry Miller indulges in a variety of sexual escapades while struggling to establish himself as a serious writer in Paris.
It is difficult these days to imagine that elementary school education was instituted by anyone at all. In fact, Swiss experimental educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) laid the groundwork for universal elementary school education and developed many of the educational theories and techniques in use even in the present day. This film focuses on a critical period in Pestalozzi's development of his educational theories, when he was running a boarding school in a disused convent for impoverished village children in the French part of Switzerland. At the time, Pestalozzi (Gian Maria Volonte) was regarded as a strange renegade, and it had only been with great difficulty that he was able to persuade even the poorest parents that his efforts to feed, clothe, and educate their children might be beneficial to them. Most of the story is told in flashbacks, narrated by one of his friends and supporters.
A decadent Cabaret in Hamburg (Germany) is near closing down. The owner decides to make a last effort to save the place: produce a male striptease show. Many candidates answer to his newspaper ad. No matter how weird were the rehearsals, the owner would have no regrets.
Three former school friends, reunited at a school reunion, decide to embark on a camping trip into the woods.
Based on the actual case of Marianne Bachmeier from 1981, the film tells the story of a mother who in a calm and determined manner shoots the murderer of her daughter seven times in the court room.The man dies at the crime scene. The media jumps at this tragedy and Bachmeier′s action is even spontaneously applauded by some. But soon, the attractive woman is cast under a pall when the media starts to look for "disclosing" details from her private life.
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor against the new straight-arrow building commissioner, Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.
A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.
An abstract look at the changes in a woman's inner self. Married to a down-and-out writer, she is forced into a liaison with a book thief.
Palermo or Wolfsburg (German: Palermo oder Wolfsburg) is a 1980 film by Werner Schroeter. It tells the story of an Italian immigrant who comes to West Germany in search of work.
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
Elvira Weishaupt, once a burly working-class butcher named Erwin, has made an enormous sacrifice for love. She has undergone a sex change for a romantic interest who has abandoned her, and she now must struggle to reconcile her past life with her present identity.
Germany in the early 1930s. Against the backdrop of the Nazis' rise, Hermann Hermann, a Russian émigré and chocolate magnate, goes slowly mad. It begins with his seating himself in a chair to observe himself making love to his wife, Lydia, a zaftig empty-headed siren who is also sleeping with her cousin. Hermann is soon given to intemperate outbursts at his workers, other businessmen, and strangers. Then, he meets Felix, an itinerant laborer, whom he delusionally believes looks exactly like himself. Armed with a new life insurance policy, he hatches an elaborate plot in the belief it will free him of all his worries.
The story follows the life of a regular German women Leni Gruyten during the 1930s and 1940s. Through her interactions with friends, family and other people she knows, the regular folks' perception of the Nazi era is shown.
The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town's siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.
The Serpent's Egg follows a week in the life of Abel Rosenberg, an out-of-work American circus acrobat living in poverty-stricken Berlin following Germany's defeat in World War I.
Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.
