Martin Wuttke
Wunderkind, scandalous author, traitor to the fatherland, fury of the theater, feminist, fashion-lover, communist, pessimist, language terrorist, rebel, enfant terrible, nest fouler, brilliant, vulnerable artist, Nobel laureate. This film about Elfriede Jelinek, who in 2004 became the first Austrian author to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, focuses on her artistic approach to language. The montage of archive material with voiceovers and interviews, some of them recently recorded, is told from Jelinek’s point of view.
Bonn depicts the rise of the young West Germany, a country struggling to break free from the terrors and legacies of World War II and longing for a 'normal' life. Into this heady and volatile mix steps Toni, a young woman determined to seize every opportunity, overcome every obstacle and make her own way in what is still a very male-dominated society. But what at first appears to be only an entry-level office job at one of the country's two competing secret services soon sucks her ever deeper into a clandestine world of suspicion
An adaptation of Doblin's text to 2015 Berlin to tell the story of 30-year-old refugee Francis, the sole survivor of a boat which crossed the Mediterranean illegally. Without citizenship papers, Francis is drawn into the underbelly of the city.
Head of the famous pencil corporation tries to make his 16 year old granddaughter ready to take his place.
Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter faces the threat of execution for refusing to fight for the Nazis during World War II.
Stefan Gabriel is an active father always looking at life positively. While he tries to give back to society, his daughters Jessica (12) and Sabrina (15) struggle with their own problems. Jessica is often mistaken for a boy and has to deal with her many ticks. She would happily swap places with Sabrina, who, despite her illness, appears to have her life completely under control. But the more Sabrina’s health worsens, the worse Jessica’s ticks become. The girls need a plan and fast. They come across a special ritual in an old book, which could be their rescue. But the girls first have to find a boy to sleep with Sabrina. They don’t have much time left and Jessica puts all she has got into implementing the life-saving plan, no matter how crazy it may be.
These young women are an odd couple. Julie is quick-witted and stubborn. She celebrates idleness and even voluntarily checks into a psychiatric clinic. Nurse Agnes, on the other hand, is always eager to do the right thing and to meet everyone's expectations of her, which is not always easy. When the two of them accidentally meet one day, odds are they won't get along. But they quickly feel attracted to one another, despite their enormous differences.
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 1992-2017. The end of the GDR gave rise to new artistic freedoms in reunited Berlin. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, rebel director Frank Castorf was appointed artistic director of the Volksbühne. His way of working altered the public’s perception of this theater. The chronological history of the Castorf era between 1992 and 2017 is told here in excerpts from the productions and in a series of conversations conducted on the long sofa in the theater's foyer.
Acclaimed series based on the true story of an unprecedented hostage crisis which shocked Germany in the summer of 1988.
In 1477 Charles the Bold dies, his only child is a girl which cannot rule without a husband. Meanwhile in Austria, Emperor Frederick III and his antagonist Louis XI France battle over said marriage prospects, battles ensue, tragedy falls.
Documentation about Christoph Schlingensief's legendary election campaign. With his theater and art actions, as a filmmaker and opera director, Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) shaped cultural and political discourse in Germany over two decades. The party “Chance 2000” was Schlingensief's biggest, most public project up to that point. For the 1998 general election Schlingensief organized an “election campaign circus“ in Berlin and founded the party Chance2000. This is an ecstatic piece of political education and a tale of a party’s life and survival.
TV post-war drama about a gruesome chapter of the Nazi era. Nadja Uhl reveals "wild" euthanasia in psychiatry. Oldenburg, 1948: For Margaret Oelkers (Uhl) and her two little sons, the pension is not enough as a war-wittwe behind and in front. But the authorities are working hard, not even because of their lack of credentials on the employment of their killed in the war. After an energetic appearance at the office, she is briefly put into the psychiatry of the Wehnen nursing home as a trainee. The consequences are bitter: one attests to their schizophrenia, takes away the children and brings them to the sister in the country. For a year, Margarete was kept in the hospital against her will, and forced to do so with electric shocks. After her release, she was placed under the guardianship of her neighbor Erich Windhorst (Martin Wuttke), a man with an SS past...
Returning to Saint Petersburg after a long exile, the dashing Yakovlev, a retired army officer, makes a comfortable living by winning other people's duels. An enigmatic, focused, and extremely skilled professional, he leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him as he swirls through polite society, frequently called upon to wield a pistol as a surrogate in duels at dawn. But when Yakovlev meets the naïve young Prince Tuchov and his beautiful sister, Princess Martha, the normally cold-hearted mercenary is surprised by hitherto undetected emotions. What transpires uncovers a series of revelations about his past and his present self.
It’s the early 1950s and little Franzi is growing up in the small Austrian town of Judenburg. Her oppressive family home is dominated by her feverish and mentally ill father, who is rigid and unpredictable. Her father, who regularly delivers halves of pork for the butcher, spent several years in the French Foreign Legion in Morocco, Algeria and Syria – a period which he partly glorifies but which still also haunts him. Franzi immerses herself in this world by looking at an abundance of beguiling yet disturbing photographs taken at the time by her father. Her own childish fantasy realm of fairy tales and picture books soon intermingle with nightmares as reality merges with imagination, war, horror and beauty.
A Chechen Muslim illegally immigrates to Hamburg and becomes a person of interest for a covert government team which tracks the movements of potential terrorists.
A set of six nested stories spanning time between the 19th century and a distant post-apocalyptic future. Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future. Action, mystery and romance weave through the story as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant future. Based on the award winning novel by David Mitchell. Directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis.
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as "The Basterds" are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds, lead by Lt. Aldo Raine soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
At some point in the not-so-distant future, an unnamed European city has evolved into a bizarre dystopian metropolis, whose residents inhabit towering utopian high-rises and work, collectively, in a single compound.
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?
In the last house just behind the western borders of Russia, between Paris/Texas and Korleput/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Cindy Sherman, Dogma 95 and Duma 2000, Frank Castorf directs his virst video production "Dämonen" ("Demons") as a sort of post-Soviet-panslavistic panopticon in his own dramaturgy based on Dostojewski's "Demons" and Camus' "The Posessed". All that in set designer Bert Neumann's industrial-designed bungalow (with swimming pool) built onto forbidding landscape.
Feature documentary about Christoph Schlingensief's political party/art project "Chance 2000".
Flanders, a famous female author, travels 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall into the German capitol. She is deeply depressed of the events because she saw the communistic states as a very good thing that has now ended. In the joy of these days she finds no person to understand her, so she has to travel back to Munich. After meeting several people, known and unknown, it seems as if there will be no way to go.
Rita Vogt is a radical West German terrorist who abandons the revolution and settles in East Germany with a new identity provided by the East German secret service. She lives in constant fear of having her cover blown, which unavoidably happens after the German re-unification.
An eccentric homage to the Rainer Werner Fassbinder days of German filmmaking.
