In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.
A 14-year-old video enthusiast obsessed with violent films decides to make one of his own and show it to his parents, with tragic results.
Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.
After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.
Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped by the RAF (Red Army Faction). The kidnap had been made to orchestrate the release of the original leaders of the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof.
Two women–a literature professor and a painter–start to rely upon their friendship as an alternative to their unhappy relationships with the men in their lives.
One night when seeking his estranged wife, Hoffmann goes to the youth center where she works. The police are there rounding up radicals who frequent the center - Hoffmann runs into the building and ends up being shot in the head. He awakens with brain trauma, partially paralyzed and unable to speak. The police accuse him of stabbing an officer; the radicals herald him as an innocent victim of police brutality. During his slow recovery at the hospital, Hoffmann must piece together his life and struggle to remember the events of that night.
Hanna and Simon are in a 20 year marriage with an unexciting relationship. By chance, they both meet and start separate affairs with Adam. Adam has no idea that his two lovers are married, until they are all found out when Hanna becomes pregnant, with the natural doubts stemming from their situation.
In 2016 the sun has turned the entire world into a scorched and barren wasteland. The humans who have survived are either resourceful or violent, and sometimes both. Marie, her little sister Leonie, and best friend Phillip, are in a car headed to the mountains - rumor has it there is water there. Along the way they meet Tom, a first-rate mechanic. But can they trust him? Fraught with deep distrust, the group is lured into an ambush where their real battle for survival begins.
Edmond, a man in his sixties whose wife has recently passed away, is told about a secret establishment where men can spend an entire night in bed alongside beautiful, sleeping young women, who stretch, roll over and dream, but never awaken. Bedazzled by their seductive yet innocent tenderness, but distressed about the reason for their deep sleep, he delves into the mystery of the house of sleeping beauties.
Abram returns to his small village and although his repairing skills are needed, people's suspicion about his sexual preferences make his life hard.
All summer long, a group of people circumnavigate each other. A group of people who are so close and yet so alienated from one another. Their isolated holiday home is the site for a resurgence of smouldering conflicts and lifelong illusions that threaten to wreck the family’s fragile unity forever.
East Berlin, 1973. Eighteen-year-old Hans Bronstein and his girlfriend arrive at his parents’ summer house to find a former Nazi camp Kapo chained there—employed when Hans’s father Arno and his friends were prisoners. Hans demands legal justice; Arno insists on his own retribution. Sister Elle, traumatized into institutionalization, cannot mediate. When Arno forces a confession, Hans frees the prisoner, confronting their irreconcilable pasts.
Mourning for a lost relationship can be every bit as devastating as mourning for someone who has died. In this drama based on the director's own novel, a couple with an unhappy marriage agree to a trial separation. They try to patch things up, and at the same time other relationships begin to develop for them.
A stage designer at a touring theater tracks down a serial killer after he becomes an amateur detective following the murder of his friend.
Dramatic life of Gustav "Bubi" Scholz, who rose from post-war obscurity and a background in black market dealings to become a celebrated European boxing champion in the late 1940s. Charismatic and widely admired, he quickly became a national icon. But as the spotlight fades and his victories grow distant, Scholz’s personal life begins to unravel, leading him into a downward spiral of addiction and emotional turmoil.
After an elaborate application process, Empress Elisabeth of Austria hires Countess Irma as her new lady-in-waiting and takes her to her summer residence on Corfu. As the two women become closer there, this soon leads to tensions back in Vienna.
13 people between the end of 60 and the middle 80: they have already experienced many things in their lives. Everyone has their own hopes, desires, conflicts and problems. What unites them is the longing for closeness — for a loving partner and the somewhat unusual way they have chosen to escape their loneliness: speed dating.
Lars Eidinger is one of Germany’s most talented and versatile actors with his love of improvisation and physical acting style. This documentary seeks to dispel some of the mystique surrounding this exceptional actor’s unique art and also provide an exciting insight into the world of theatre and filmmaking.
Six numbers in the lottery! If that's not good luck for Georg Freudenreich and fellow winner and brother-in-law Heinrich. This distracts from the feelings Heinrich has suppressed all his life. He has fallen in love with Edward. But now, at over 70, how is he supposed to live a love he has always denied himself?
A documentary focusing on the rebuilding projects in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the German gangster comedy, Jan Josef Liefers and Justus von Dohnányi play two petty criminals who are supposed to do a job on Mallorca, but who can't stand each other.
In a penthouse apartment above the city, a small group of friends has been cut off from the world for decades. Sirens sound below, but here, time is stopped. All of them are now old, but they continue to party as if they were twenty years old. Ava, tired of the endless debauchery, dreams of escaping.
The third episodic film, after Deutschland im Herbst and Der Kandidat, in which notable German filmmakers reflect on the state of their country. A collage of documentary and dramatised sequences dealing with such topics as overkill, peace demonstrations, NATO arms policy, and life after the next war.
How should you spend your time if your days are numbered? This is the question facing Linda, a young woman suffering from a congenital heart defect. Contrary to her doctors’ expectations she has managed to survive to celebrate her thirtieth birthday, but with an operation looming, Linda nonetheless feels a deep need to spend what might be her last weekend with her two sisters: Katharina who is older, and Clara who is younger than her. Linda must use their journey, which begins at their family’s weekend house and ends in Paris, to examine the ways in which her family has been fundamentally affected by her illness; she must also consider how much she can expect from herself and her sisters – faced as they are with the possibility of her death.
Georg, who is happy with his job as a scientist, with his loving wife and with his three children, hears one day that an accident has happened in a chemical plant nearby. All of a sudden, he finds himself face to face with one of the victims. The man, whose face has been eaten away by the sour gas that escaped from the plant, is staring at him in despair. Does Georg really see the man or is this a mere hallucination? Is he becoming insane or is he more alert to the dangers of the world than the common man?
A film about an amour fou between a young doctor and a former teacher. She, daughter of German Jews who emigrated to France, returns to Germany one day: she escapes from her bourgeois life in France into the memory of her childhood.
A darkness swirls at the center of a world-renowned dance company, one that will engulf the artistic director, an ambitious young dancer, and a grieving psychotherapist. Some will succumb to the nightmare. Others will finally wake up.
Sin and Illy have a plan: on a Greek island they want to get 'clean' on their own. But the intention of the two girls fails already on the way to the airport. Finally Sin realizes she has to go the way out of heroin addiction all alone.
An eccentric former actress finds a body which disappears into thin air.
The Ballade of Tubbie, Tim, Jojo, Birdie and Marie, tells in seven chapters the story of five teenagers, who have found a substitute family in each other.
A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.
Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birthday celebrations of an East German family turn into a tragicomical moment of political and personal breakdown.
The dream of owning a house in the countryside comes true by chance for a family with two children. The parents buy "a house in need of slight renovation" at auction, but have obviously overstretched themselves in several ways. Of all things, the supposed snag in this house, which was nevertheless purchased at a low price, is two strange old neighbors who soon turn out to be a blessing for the family...
In no less than 180 minutes the film showed frenzied dashes of wild colors and idyllic natural images, of wonderful music and powerful lyricism, which, among others was flawlessly recited by star actors such as Corinna Harfouch, Angela Winkler and Ulrich Matthes. The work treats of the consciousness-defining echoing thunder of modern rock music, of the rock inscriptions of the ancient Egyptians, of the Merseburg magic spells, the author’s childhood impressions, in the latter’s homeland in the forests of the Upper Palatinate, and the ghosts of the Nazi era, who today continue to haunt us in the most vivid manner.
When Edith Howland's husband abandons her for a younger woman, leaving her with their alcoholic son and his senile uncle, she begins recording details of an imaginary, much more successful life where she has friends and grandchildren. However, this diversion soon grows unhealthy when she becomes slowly convinced that the fantasies are real.
The movie version of Christoph Schlingensief's stageplay.
While on a longer business trip, a wannabe poet urges his beautiful but more simple wife to answer his overly swollen love letters. With no idea how to respond she forwards the letters to a new young school teacher to use his answers instead...
Portrait of German actress Angela Winkler.
Director Leon de Winter has taken a thriller with political and psychological overtones, and scrambled it into a series of vignettes that are mixed-up in time and in location, thereby dashing any hope of following the story. A journalist goes to a southern European country to interview a well-known terrorist who has refused to stop his activities even though the revolution he fought for ended successfully five years earlier. Questions are raised about adopting violence as a way of life without at first realizing it and about the seeming impossibility of raising the consciousness of backwater cultures. Perhaps because of the way the story has been filleted into fragments, characters like the journalist and terrorist do not have enough continuous screen time to build up their individuality, a second factor that makes it difficult to become involved in the drama.
Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.
When Christine, young and out of work, arrives in Paris without money, a job or support, vulnerable and ignorant of the rules of the game, she seems to be an easy victim. But she is determined not to let herself be destroyed.
Sorted out - and at almost 50! Both professionally and privately, window dresser Tanja feels like she's been left behind. But she bravely sticks her chin out. Of course she can still keep up, and after one order after another falls through, Tanja is eager to start canvassing. An online course is designed to make her digitally fit. She is so preoccupied with herself that she neglects the most important people around her.
A few hours spent together give a young woman and an older man a new perspective on life.
When Ovid's “Metamorphoses” meet Vivaldi's music: conceived and directed by Barrie Kosky, an effervescent show presented at the 2025 Salzburg Festival. With Cecilia Bartoli, Lea Desandre, Nadezhda Karyazina, and Philippe Jaroussky, as well as actress Angela Winkler in the spoken role of Orpheus.
In 2030, retired actress Mrs. Winkler lives bitterly and marked by pain. When her daughter Emi accepts a theater offer, a care robot named Pavlovich takes over the care of her mother. Unexpectedly, his knowledge of classical plays seems to reawaken Mrs. Winkler's will to live...
