The crook couple Peter and Gwen have run away from Germany and are dreaming of a sweet life on Mallorca. During a break-in at the villa of multimillionaire Walter Ekland, Peter discovers by chance that the old man is using a detective agency to find his son, who was given up for adoption years ago. Ekland has never seen his supposed last family member and heir and therefore does not know that he has long since died. Peter sees the great opportunity of a lifetime. He assumes the identity of the lost son in order to get his hands on the big money. But the unscrupulous Decker, a private detective who was tasked with finding Ekland's real son, discovers the fraud and blackmails Gwen and Peter...
The West German security police, Verfassungsschutz, need help to infiltrate a group connected to the Rote Arme Fraktion. The Swedish James Bond, Carl Hamilton, goes to Hamburg, pretending to be a Swedish officer, thrown out of the country after having been exposed as an East German spy. He gets in contact with the terrorists and joins them. Together they are planning to strike against the CIA headquarters in Stockholm.
Frank and his S&M partner are surprised by Frank's harridan mother when she walks in on the pair in an amorous clinch. Frank's mother threatens to disinherit her son if he does not settle down and get married. Frank hires the actress Klara to pose as his wife, and the pair moves into a quaint country house. Soon the newly weirds are both after their handsome neighbour Eugen. Frank becomes confused when he feels he may be falling for his first female.
Nik, a released prisoner who started writing in prison, wants to leave his past behind him, but refuses to contact his former girlfriend and her family. Under the name of his jail buddy Henry, he moves in with his pen pal - who has never seen him - and is always watched suspiciously by their roommate. Nik began writing in prison and now seeks contact with the literary culture, even though he feels disgusted by the pompous fuss of this society. He is not without talent and works on a novel in which he minutely describes the abduction of an industrialist. Henry gets shot at the prison breakout and visits Nik to get help from him. He likes his novel plot and wants to put it into action.
The young Munich sensational reporter Raoul Miller has attacked a lot of people in his cocaine report, who now take terrible revenge: they kill his girlfriend Raphaela and his parents. The drug mafia also ensures that Raoul loses his good reputation and becomes an outsider. But Raoul does not give up...
The Second World War is over and now begins in post-war Germany, the reconstruction. Jakob Formann sees his chance here and begins a rapid rise as an entrepreneur.
Thomas Krömer follows the traces of a brutal murder in werewolf-manner out of personal interest. After investigating for some time, the traces all point to one person: himself. Now, he has to find out whether he surprisingly turns into a blood-seeking werewolf at full moon without knowing it or if there is an other solution to the murders. Police are getting pretty suspicious after Thomas' own grandmother has been brutally slaughtered in her little fairy-tale-fashioned house in the woods, and it will soon be time for a full moon...
Born into a well-off family, Franz Blum had led a carefree youth until, some time after graduating from high school, he was arrested by the police. For, involved by a gang of bad boys, the young man had taken part in a bank robbery. A "heroic deed" which earned him six years in prison. Once behind bars, he was treated with ruthless inhumanity by the guards. And little by little - but inexorably - Franz turned into an insurgent...
It is 1943, and the German army—ravaged and demoralised—is hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of the madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich is still vastly superior to the Russian army. However, within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors.
Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.
Zündschnüre explores the emotional and psychological aftermath of war. The story follows two former soldiers who return home after serving in a brutal conflict. They find themselves struggling to reintegrate into civilian life, grappling with trauma, guilt, and their difficult pasts. As they attempt to reconnect with their families and rebuild their lives, the haunting effects of war continue to haunt them, testing their resilience and relationships. Fuses is a poignant and intense exploration of human suffering, healing, and the lingering scars of violence.
The leader of a right-wing German political party discovers that an illiterate woodcarver is actually the son of Adolf Hitler.
In a fictitious show, candidates attack each other with knives and fight, and in the end the presenter (Burkard Driest) is stabbed to death. Like Das Millionenspiel 25 years earlier, the Private Life Show criticized the increasingly drastic broadcasting formats on commercial television.
A great mosaic, a labyrinth of scenes, dialogue splinters, interviews, portraits of people surrounding Hamlet and wanting to be part of his story.
This 1987 documentary is the only window into an experimental open-air penal colony in the Peruvian Amazon, which no camera has ever entered and has been rarely written about.
Interview film with German director Werner Herzog revisiting the films he made up to ca. 1977.
A scary serial killer is around: he cuts off young women's tongues. Commissioner Michelle Eisner notes striking similarities between the three victims so far: They were customers of the "loverboys". Behind this is a callboy ring, which also includes the attractive and inscrutable Lanou. Michelle reluctantly accepts the help of the experienced police psychologist Busch to clarify the case. He is a master at thinking his way into the psyche of the perpetrator. The main suspect for him is call boy Lanou. This suspicion is supported by the tabloid reporter Eva Hellmann, who is also researching the series of murders. While Michelle's environment became more and more vehement on LanousIf arrest is urgent, she is less and less able to evade his erotic charisma.
Three actors portray scenes from the life of Sterling Hayden, with a particular focus on his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Inspired by Hayden’s memoir “Wanderer.”
Seduced by the country, in which German director Dieter Schidor saw a decadent tropical charm, he brought together a varied group of people and involved them in the production.
A handsome Belgian sailor on shore leave in the port of Brest, who is also a drug smuggler and murderer, embarks upon a voyage of highly charged and violent homosexual self-discovery that will change him forever from the man he once was.
A superb, moving and thrilling interview with American actor Sterling Hayden (1916-86), held in Besançon, France, on board a dilapidated barge, when he was 65 years old. An unparalleled portrait, in his own words and without any qualms, of a legendary Hollywood star, icon of film noir and the western, who was also a marine, an OSS agent, an anti-communist informer, a writer and a wandering sailor: the hero of his own life.