Wolfgang Michael
After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.
Paul Bacher is in crisis. If he could feel in the past as one of the most influential writers of his generation, he has long lacked ideas and impetus for a new great work. His reading tours are becoming more and more a sad affair with too much alcohol and too little public. Then Paul overflows in a drunken hitchhiker, flees first scared and later removes the body, without talking to anyone about the experience. But something is flowing in its interior. Paul starts to write again. The criticism is done, but the story about the death of a hitchhiker also arouses suspicion.
YOUTH explores the lifelong bond between two friends vacationing in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his loving daughter Lena, Mick is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last important film for his muse Brenda. And where will inspiration lead their younger friend Jimmy, an actor grasping to make sense of his next performance?
Sophie, a young photographer, exchanges her apartment with a student from Marseille. It is February and Marseille seems harsh and closed in the bright sun. Sophie dives into the city, she is alone, she takes photographs. In an auto-repair garage, she asks a young mechanic, Pierre, if he can get her a car. Two days later they meet again and spend the evening in a bar, captivated by the lightness of not knowing anything about each other. Sophie is happy. When she returns to Berlin, she is immediately immersed again in her former life. Her love for Ivan, the husband of her best friend Hanna, remains undeclared and the relationship between Hanna and Ivan seems to dominate. Sophie remains on the outside, yearns to leave, and decides to travel to Marseille for a second time.
Cologne towards the end of the Second World War. The city is in ruins, everyone is afraid, many are dead. It is a time of great inhumanity. Cologne’s young Edelweiss Pirates refuse to submit to the pressure of the Nazi regime. They fight with the Hitler Youth and scrawl anti-war propaganda on walls. Karl is an Edelweiss Pirate; his younger brother, Peter, is in the Hitler Youth movement. The two young men have been alone ever since their mother’s death in a bombing raid; their father is serving at the front, and their older brother, Otto, has been killed in action. Otto’s financée, Cilly, is doing her best to survive the war with her children. Carl is trying to help her.
Two young women sitting in a café on a summer day. Situations found everyday a thousand times over. But what happens when you try to depict this normality?
A largely plotless, fado-scored journey through the gloomy cobblestone streets, zombie bars, and fetid basements of a sordid harbor town populated by German-speaking sots and Portuguese guest workers. An unhappy young couple, Leni and Anton, quarrel and split separately into the rat’s ass of the evening. Everyone is looking for love, but no one finds any—although Leni does pick up a trick.
A young photographer has fallen in love with his girlfriend’s sister. Nobody knows quite what to do. A stylish variation on the problems of triolism made with striking stability of style and a great feeling for mise-en-scène. The film provides an impressive mixture of stylised camera angles and realism, by filming taut and geometrically in simple interiors and existing locations. Her self-confidently designed, naturally acted everyday drama made German critics compare it with the greats from film history.
