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.
In occupied Paris, an actress wed to a Jewish theater owner must keep him hidden from the Nazis while doing both of their jobs.
After a chance encounter with a wanted man, a woman is harassed by the police and press until she takes violent action.
The story is simple: two people who have recently suffered a great deal come together for consolation rather than love.
A young woman left her family for an unspecified reason. The husband determines to find out the truth and starts following his wife. At first, he suspects that a man is involved. But gradually, he finds out more and more strange behaviors and bizarre incidents that indicate something more than a possessed love affair.
Love story spanning 60 years of the lives of Charlotte and Hugo. As a teenager before the war she is in love with him, but he marries her sister. They share some brief happy moments during the difficult post-war period, then they are separated for the longest time. They meet again as 80-year olds.
An account of the events before and after a murder committed by a disturbed businessman in a strained marriage, and what led him to perform such a shocking act.
Sebastien Grenier, a former French spy, is working as a financial analyst in Zurich. However, his peaceful existence starts to disintegrate when he is recruited by a top French intelligence operative to discover how one of their own secret agents was found out and executed in broad daylight.
In 1923 Berlin, following the suicide of his brother, an American acrobat struggles to survive while facing unemployment, depression, alcoholism, and the social decay of Germany during the Weimar Republic.
Swiss dancer Diane and rising German actor Heinz Bennent build a tight-knit family on modest means. Their children - Anne, Burgtheater’s “princess,” and David, famed for The Tin Drum - thrive under their parents’ support and critique. Bound by love and talent, this quartet shares an unbreakable bond.
No one knows, or is ever likely to know how many disabled or handicapped relatives have been hidden from the outside world in attics and basements over the years. In this wry comedy, Basile is an eleven-year old boy living in a rural French town (along with his mother) with his grandparents. He has the usual boyish adventures in town, punctuated with odd goings-on brought about by events which take place in his grandfather's crocodile farm. However, there is a deep rivalry between his grandmother and her wheelchair-bound half-sister, Cecile, who has kept hidden from the world (and her family), and has lived in the attic for decades. Basile eventually feels the wrongness of her situation and feels that he may be the reincarnation of Victor, Cecile's long-lost lover. Eventually things come to a head in a confrontation which provides the town gossips with material for years to come.
Lulu models for a young painter who tries to seduce her. When her husband enters the room he dies from a heart attack. Lulu marries the painter, who commits suicide when he finds out that she has been having a long standing affair with Dr Schon and whose son gives her a job. Lulu kills Dr Schon and goes to London to live with his son. Eventually, she becomes a prostitute and dies a victim of Jack the Ripper.
It’s December 1999, and 25-year-old Jonah has just graduated from film school. As the new millennium begins, Jonah marries his longtime sweetheart Lila. Over the course of six months, the couple meet a number of interesting people, including Irina, an exiled Russian actress, as well as spending their time with Jonah’s sister Cecile and his filmmaking mentor Anziano. The discussions Jonah has with these friends and strangers help him to gain some perspective on his life and the new millennium.
An adaptation of Franz Kafka's classic story about Gregor Samsa, a man who awakes and sees himself suddenly turned into a repulsive insect.
The aging writer Aurelio Morelli is disillusioned: although the critics like his books, they are barely read. He develops hatred on youth and their depraved moral. One night he goes with a callgirl - and kills her. The police doesn't have a clue, only the unscrupulous sensational journalist Bossi suspects him. Instead of naming him to the police, he persuades Morelli to write about the murder for his paper. Morelli uses the occasion to write his memoirs, in which he confesses lots of other crimes before this last one...
An 11-year-old boy survives a serious car accident but remains mentally and physically disabled for the rest of his life. The film depicts the situation of those affected and the reaction of those around them. It is a call for more humane treatment of people with disabilities.
In Genève, bookseller and publisher Axel Thorpe catches willful, rich 16-year-old Sibylle Ashby shoplifting. She brags about her writing, so he challenges her to produce a book. She writes an erotic novel that Thorpe publishes anonymously, and it becomes a best seller. She also tries to capture the love of this 40-year-old publisher but he drops her for her older sister.
Consul Werle holds a reception in honour of the homecoming of his son Gregers. At the reception, Gregers meets his childhood friend, Hjalmar Ekdal, who is married to Gina, a former maid of the Werle family. Hjalmar is unaware that Werle had an affair with Gina and that their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig is not his child. Gregers moves in with the Ekdals with the intention of allowing unsuspecting Hjalmar and his family to share in the "happiness of truth". Hedwig is entirely devoted to a wild duck, which lives on a pond outside their house. When Hjalmar learns the truth about his daughter, he wants to leave his family. Gregers advises Hedwig to kill the wild duck so that her father, impressed by this sacrifice, will return home. On the following day, Hedwig's birthday, she doesn't shoot the duck, but shoots herself instead.
In 1917, the boys from Irish club Avondale United parade through the town with the cup they have just won.
Ann, a ten-year-old girl, becomes the sole heir of millions from her grandmother. Ann's parents, who are short of money and have lost all hope of a bright future try to manipulate Ann's imagination in such a way that she loses her mind.
Married with a young daughter, a 30-year-old woman yearns to return to her working life as a translator, to the confusion and consternation of her husband, a prosperous engineer. A formally stringent adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
A young, easygoing pilot discovers the mutual attraction between his chief pilot's wife and himself. The two become lovers, and are nearly discovered on several occasions. However, when the wife becomes pregnant, her husband has reason to believe he is not the father and, indeed, that the culprit is the young pilot. He arranges for the young man to have an unfortunate accident, and all proceeds as if nothing had happened.
After eleven years of solitary confinement, Perahim, convicted of murdering a police officer, is released early from prison after exceptionally good behavior. He has a son that he wants to take care of.
In occupied France during the WWII, a German officer is murdered. The collaborationist Vichy government decides to pin the murder on six petty criminals. Loyal judges are called in to convict them as quickly as possible.
General George S. Patton died in a car accident in 1945. But was his death actually a murder. Is he targeted by Nazis angered by Germany's defeat? Or by Russians who knew that Patton had argued in favor of invading the Soviet Union towards the end of the war? Or is it because Patton is investigating the theft of a quarter of a billion dollars of Nazi gold? Or is it because his subordinate Colonels - the flamboyantly gay Colonel and his worried lover are fearful that he is getting too close to discovering the truth.
Sisters Maria and Anna live together. Maria is a most proficient executive secretary, encouraging Anna to finish her studies and start a career. Anna broods, threatens to quit university, takes pills, and keeps a diary. When Maria's relationship with Maurice, the son of her boss, starts to lead to love, Anna takes a selfish and drastic step that plummets Maria into solitude. No longer able to connect with Maurice, Maria does establish a relationship with Miriam, a typist at her office who becomes a surrogate younger sister. But Maria is intrusive as well as helpful. Can this or any relationship work out for this talented woman whose past seems to choke her soul?
A TV reporter and his assisstant go to a small Swiss village to do a programme with a reclusive scientist, an expert on world food shortages. During this time, an Italian immigrant worker is killed in a road crash and the reporter becomes involved in uncovering the truth about his death.
The story of an impossible love between a 60 years old jobless bookkeeper and an unpredictable 40 years younger woman, who seems to be in big troubles.
Wed just as war breaks out, Jeanne hardly gets to know her military husband, Louis, before the debacle of 1940. While waiting for his return from a POW camp, Jeanne journeys through countless affairs with Louis' comrades- in-arms. Hoping to forget these wartime betrayls, Louis takes his wife and the infant twins he didn't father to Berlin, where she falls for Matthais, a sensitive German industrialist. When the Indochinese war sends Louis to Vietnam, Matthais follows Jeanne back to France. A subsequent move to Damascus where Louis is posted as military attache, fails to break their bond.
The story of Napoleon Bonaparte's grandniece, the famous Princess Marie, her friendship and her work with Sigmund Freud.
The film does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two-month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped and later murdered by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the original leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
Through psychological warfare, a man manages to outdo his former wife's second husband and return to her.
On a rainy vacation day in a hotel room in Yugoslavia, a 40-year-old father and his adolescent daughter are bored. In the free-flowing surroundings, the dreams he once had in his youth come back to life in him. The game becomes almost serious. Only the presence of his daughter makes him realize that there is no way to start a new life without acting irresponsibly towards his child. And so he is left with a quiet resignation and the hope that his daughter will do better one day.
The leader of a right-wing German political party discovers that an illiterate woodcarver is actually the son of Adolf Hitler.
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.
An insurance investigator meets an attractive woman in a hotel on his way to check out the causes of a fire that destroyed a movie set.
The fate of a young girl named Svea, who has always been hunted down, in the depths of an immense forest governed by the monstrous Akos, not far from a mysterious castle inhabited by the noble Adrien, who will become the willing sacrificial victim of an incredible sylvan entity.
When her father dies unexpectantly, a young woman starts to get suspicious about her mother's behaviour.
A lonely man is taunted by the voice of a woman he once knew.
In 1934, young archaeologist Robert returns to his home in Salzburg after spending several years working in Crete. He wants to officially break up with his original fiancée Hannah, as he has fallen in love with his employer's wife. But his personal plans get caught up in the political turmoil of the Austrian coup year. In a small village, he and Hannah find themselves caught between the fronts of the coup plotters and the Home Guard troops. A defenseless deaf-mute is to be lynched as a scapegoat. To protect him, Robert invents a mysterious "man in the reeds." But Hannah also eventually falls victim to the unrest.
A French industrialist, Bernard Corain, who frequently travels on business to the German Democratic Republic, is contacted by the SDECE to establish a "relationship" with a high-ranking East German official who wishes to leave his country clandestinely... Although risky and even dangerous, the case seems, at first glance, quite straightforward...
About Icelandic composer Jon Leifs (1899-1968) who spent much of his life in Germany before WWII. The film begins in the 1930s after he has married the daughter of an industrialist, Annie, who is also a concert pianist. This era was frustrating for Leifs because his works were seldom performed. Iceland's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1995
Jones is called in when others want to kill. Jones works quickly, precisely, successfully. His clients pay the price he demands without question—the lone killer can be relied upon. Jones arrives in the city on the early train. He looks exhausted. He will need this day to take care of the boss of Warner-Trans. Alexander Scrooge provides him with the necessary information. Everything else is routine: observing the victim, determining the angle of the shot at the scene of the crime, preparing the alibi. When he is about to kill, the unexpected happens. The Warner boss is on his guard. Has the middleman Alexander betrayed the assignment? Is the client Franketti playing a dirty game? Or is Abraham, the big boss whom Franketti can't compete with, pulling the strings? Jones was used to clean work. Now he's caught between two gangs. Jane, a beautiful young woman, decides his fate.
Geneva, 1980s. Three friends in search of themselves. Bruno, an architect, is married to a woman he cannot simply love. Philippe, a more refined journalist, refuses to accept the reality of separating from his girlfriend Sonia. Bruno, the youngest of the three, collects one-night stands...
Arrived in New York, Margaux went to the bedside of her daughter Jess, who tried to commit suicide. She lives with Vic, who no longer satisfies her sexually. His ex, his father and his best friend, reappear soon in the life of Jess.
After World War II, an aging controversial Norwegian Nobel Prize winner must confront his past and the moral implications of his Nazi sympathies while being challenged by a man intent on holding him accountable.
Francesca, a magistrate, seems happily married to a successful and wealthy engineer. They prepare to spend a holiday together when Francesca is instructed to shed light on the mysterious death of a girl, Rosa Franceschi, who threw herself from the terrace of her house. Francesca interrogates friends and neighbours of the victim, especially Veronica Marini who, living opposite the victim's apartment, followed the whole story. This is how she discovers her husband's affair with Rosa Franceschi and her involvement in the girl's suicide or murder.
Martin, a sculptor, is dying in his bed on a barge that floats along a fog-shrouded waterway. As he agonizingly descends into a final oblivion, his second wife is at his bedside, comforted by his first wife -- also present.
Guillaume de Burlador is a private tutor who hits a low point sufficiently severe for him to contemplate a somewhat theatrical suicide. Instead he is taken off by flying boat to a mad French colonial possession bedecked by mad servants and crazy decor. Three educated and rather gorgeous women live there, and they hire him to tutor a young teenager, but more with plans to seduce him in mind.
The life of the actress and model Capucine inspired this film by Michel Soutter, played by Capucine herself in the company of Heinz Béat, Antoinette Moya, Corinne Corderey and Jean-Pierre Malo.
An oily careerist for whom becoming the highest earner is not enough: now he also wants a title of nobility.
Le Due Croci brings us the story of Blessed Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite friar, Catholic priest, journalist and professor of philosophy. Brandsma was vehemently opposed to Nazi ideology and died in the infamous Dachau concentration camp. He has been beatified as a Martyr of the Faith.