Based on the actual case of Marianne Bachmeier from 1981, the film tells the story of a mother who in a calm and determined manner shoots the murderer of her daughter seven times in the court room.The man dies at the crime scene. The media jumps at this tragedy and Bachmeier′s action is even spontaneously applauded by some. But soon, the attractive woman is cast under a pall when the media starts to look for "disclosing" details from her private life.
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 not-too-distant future Berlin is shocked by a series of spectacular suicides; a policeman's investigations lead him to a beautiful, enigmatic woman and the revelation of a sinister plot to manipulate the population through mass hypnosis.
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.
A hard-working young man meets and falls in love with his sister's bridesmaid. He soon finds out how disturbed she really is.
A family of a German linguist lives with an indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea.
Expatriate Henry Miller indulges in a variety of sexual escapades while struggling to establish himself as a serious writer in Paris.
A guy having sex with a woman on a rooftop – just to get her coffee-machine.
Hamburg student Gabriele constantly dreams of her boyfriend in Australia. The reality is different, because while she sits in lecture halls during the day, she is a dancer in a peep show at night. The place is run by the mysterious Arnold, who not only has his eye on Gabriele, but is also carrying around a secret that he soon lets Gabriele in on: his strip joint is just a pretext for a much more lucrative business, in which a certain Mrs. Lohmann is pulling the strings. Her boss Arnold, with whom she is having an affair, is doing dirty business. He is threatened by a killer because he wants out.
Living and loving in a small village in the south of Germany. People and their conflicts with morality, manners, and society.
Time of darkness. Time of fire kindled against cold and fear. During the Holy Night, the seven year old Micha has to escape with his young mother Marianne from the violence of his drunken father... During their one week odyssey through frozen Germany, mother and son meet people to offer them shelter... Crushed by their own poverty, or dominated by their feelings of being lost, these people just hurt them deeper and they can be nothing other than stations of their continuous escape
The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town’s siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.
Elvira Weishaupt, once a burly working-class butcher, has made an enormous sacrifice for love. She has undergone a sex change for a romantic interest who has abandoned her, and she now must struggle to reconcile her past life with her present identity.
The true story of a journalist who investigates the backgrounds of the Oktoberfest terror attack of 1980.
An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.
In the 1770s, Swiss farmer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi established a school for poor orphaned children in the Aargau. Up to total exhaustion he sacrificed himself for his pedagogical theories. Five years later, the project of the idealistic educator failed after bloody attacks of the French. In retrospect, the disappointed Pestalozzi experiences the last few months with "his" children.
A tangled drama of cruelty and manipulation, attraction and love.
An unusual story of a triangular relationship in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls under his spell. It will be her last great passion. Her feelings are so strong and all-encompassing that Ivan can neither understand nor return them.
Anna, married to the lawyer Rainer, despite all remorse, begins a liaison with the charming pharmaceutical representative Lars - fortunately the husband of her friend Bettina. Their meeting in a luxury hotel has fatal consequences: Anna and Lars are ear-witnesses of a supposed murder on the head of a call girl ring. Mistakenly, Anne's brother Max was suspected of doing something. Bettina, who has useful contacts due to her thriving wellness center, ensures that Max is released on bail. However, to acquit him they need Anna's statement - which would inevitably reveal her affair with Lars. So there has to be another solution...
At night, a violent confrontation between a pimp and a Greek guest worker takes place on Hamburg's Reeperbahn, resulting in the latter's death. In the subsequent trial before a jury, contradictory statements make it difficult to decide whether this was an intentional act or an accident.
A copywriter gets famous with his first book. When asked to write a new novel about love for his publisher, he urgently needs tutoring since he doesn't know the first thing about it. His way through the beds leads him to the very young Orli. In her he discovers the true meaning of love, which makes him forget all the wrong paths of the past decades and feel young again.
Larry Cambell is a merciless womanizer and ruthless businessman. Now the sonny boy wants to sell his brother Roy's new invention in the United States. Under the pretext of making the American business perfect, Larry asks Roy to sign a contract. In reality, he wants to pocket the proceeds alone. A short time later, Larry is dead: he is found in his apartment with his skull bashed in. Not only his brother, who was cheated out of his share, is a suspect, but also the lawyer Ryder, who lost his wife to Larry. Clare Norman had just quarrelled with the dead man over his numerous womanizing affairs and he was also not on good terms with gossip columnist Jo Mitchell. Scotland Yard Inspector Cleaver takes up the investigation.
1640. A man attempts to flee from England, torn apart by religious unrest, to France. He is the philosopher and irreverent cynic Thomas Hobbes. But before he can reach the ship that will save him, civil war breaks out. The chaos inspires him to develop new philosophical theories. While writing his futuristic epic, he is assisted by a nobleman who accompanies him on his escape disguised as a servant. The futuristic epic that Hobbes invents is set in the present day. The main characters are a married couple who run a grocery store and try to compete with a supermarket.
Bored with her stuffy village life, teenager Susanne decides to run away to the bright lights Frankfurt, while her boyfriend does his military. Caught in the swamp of drugs, prostitution, violence and human trafficking, Susanne experiences the dark side of the big city.
Detective Mona Seiler’s new case: 17-year-old Samuel Plessen, son of famed psychotherapist Fabian Plessen, is found dead. Clues point to the notorious “Beauty-Killer,” so Mona enlists profiler Oliver Kern. As more victims surface, linked to Fabian’s hidden GDR past and a missing sister, Mona races to protect Fabian’s daughter before the killer strikes again.
Linda is a successful art director, but not only her career but also her bad experiences with men have left her lonely. Linda's gay colleague Donald is her best "friend," but at the moment he needs help himself. He is in love with the agency boss Peter König but Peter doesn't dare openly admit to this relationship.
A young man gets caught between two women and finally loses both of them because he is unable to make up his mind. A love triangle that tries to conjure up hidden emotional states.
The passion of Christ, based on J. S. Bach's "Johannes-Passion". Its mix of music, speech, dancing and singing re-creates the style of antique Greek tragedies.
With a pounding heart, the horse madman Martina Kilian awaits the wedding with the glamorous jumping rider Arndt Graf Solm-Weltingen. When the Count hangs up the cavalry just before the marriage to enter the catering business of his future parents-in-law, Martina painfully notes that Arndt is not the man of their dreams. While the wedding preparations are in full swing, Martina falls in love with sympathetic veterinarian Erik.
Late fall 1947: The inhabitants of Frauenburg, a US garrison town, are facing another harsh post-war winter. But a social sensation causes a stir: Freya Sonnenberg, one of the three daughters of the former mayor, is to marry the American base commander Bellmont. Each of the sisters has her own hopes for this event: For Freya, the wedding is the start of a carefree and prosperous life after the war. For the older sister Nora, it means belated satisfaction for the early death of her beloved father. And Gudrun, the youngest, is looking forward to an uninhibited sex life. But one evening before the wedding, a blackmailer threatens to destroy the sisters' plans. Compromising details from Freya's time in the army emerge. Was she really the playmate of a prominent Nazi bigwig...?
Rhoda loves Max but he is a workaholic. So Rhoda decides to become a successful businesswoman herself and falls in love with her co-worker Paul. So Max quits his job to fight for his relationship with Rhoda full-time.
A decadent Cabaret in Hamburg is near closing down. The owner decides to make a last effort to save the place: produce a male striptease show. Many candidates answer to his newspaper ad. No matter how weird were the rehearsals, the owner would have no regrets.
An abstract look at the changes in a woman's inner self. Married to a down-and-out writer, she is forced into a liaison with a book thief.
Interior designer Kim Joosten is like many modern women: self-confident, successful and always concerned about her appearance. When she saves a child's life at a barbecue, she suffers severe burns and is disfigured by a large facial scar. However, representation and good looks are a must in her job, in which she is now increasingly marginalized. When she also discovers that her husband Max is having an affair, Kim no longer knows what to do.
Unfortunately, Fanny can only enjoy her unexpected wealth for a short time. The tax office asks her to pay a hefty inheritance tax. Because of the valuable property, she has to pay far more than she was bequeathed in cash. Debts again - and her "crazy" half-brother Elias on top of that? She would like to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
A property on Lake Ammersee including inventory plus 183,000 euros and 47 cents - Fanny Steininger is over the moon about this inheritance! A certain Walter Jeromin bequeathed it all to her. Allegedly her biological father, but the 60-year-old slob, who has just quit her job as a train attendant, more or less ignores this. After all, her dad, who once made a name for himself as the white sausage king (and regularly appears in her daydreams as an advisor), died back in 1969. However, Fanny has to fulfill one condition in order to inherit her estate, as her junior boss Tristan from the law firm Hackenbusch & Söhne informs her: She is to apply for guardianship of her supposed half-brother Elias, who lives with Asperger's syndrome.
Jojo, a young art student, discovers the microcosm of an art academy with all of its opportunities and contradictions.
Three former school friends, reunited at a school reunion, decide to embark on a camping trip into the woods.
A detective with the highest clearance rate in the country, gets involved in a case with a young woman arrested for having killed her child. The detective falls under the spell of the young woman.
Werner Schroeter's rhapsody of excess leaps from 1949 Cuba to contemporary France to points in between, while its feverishly shifting visual style evokes and parodies everything from kitschy Mexican telenovelas to silent French art films.
The siblings Bebe and Mikhail leave their country of Moldova to apply for asylum in Germany. Their flight turns into a modern odyssey.
This absolutely top-notch documentary by Robert Fischer is a fascinating look back at not just the film in question, but Fassbinder's meteoric career which ended all too soon with his untimely death. Archival footage of Fassbinder is utilized (including several fascinating snippets culled from interviews he did at the disastrous Cannes premiere of Despair), as well as many others involved in the film and its release. Even if you're not a particular fan of Despair, or even in fact of Fassbinder, this is stellar documentary film making and is an intriguing look at one of the most enigmatic masters of the New German Cinema.
A desperate family on its way to self-destruction - a drama about struggling generations, "Kronos" becomes an absurd symbol of the recurrent process of perishing and new beginnings.
The story of Marie Ward, a religious woman from a devout, aristocratic Yorkshire Catholic family who lived between 1585 and 1645 and moved to St. Omer in Walloon France, where she joined the Order of St. Clare, later returning to England to found her own order and devote her life to helping others.
Leni Gruyetin, a resident of Nazi Germany, lives a tumultuous life as she bears witness to the fascist regime of the Nazis.
Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor against the new straight-arrow building commissioner, Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.
A housewife, annoyed by her husband who constantly wanders in brothels, and a child, who eventually throws her into the Rhine, begins a new life and attracts a prostitute.
On a vital military mission for the Allies, Indy comes across a disease-ravaged African village and is able to rescue one small child from certain death. The presence of the child endangers the mission, leaving Indy in a moral quandary; fighting his conscience, his sense of duty, his own men and the enemy as he battles his way across the country. Depressed by the turmoil around him, Indy reaches his lowest point. Hope appears in the presence of Albert Schweitzer, a profoundly inspiring and committed doctor, philosopher and musician. Helping out at Schweitzer's jungle hospital, Indy finds his faith in humanity restored and his outlook on life forever changed in this beautiful and moving film.
Mika, heiress to a Swiss chocolate company, is married to celebrated pianist André and stepmother to his son, Guillaume, whose mother died in a car wreck on his tenth birthday. Their lives are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Jeanne, a young woman who has learned she was almost switched with Guillaume at birth.
The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town’s siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.
When 22-year-old Rainer Werner Fassbinder storms the stage of a small, progressive theatre in Munich 1967, and seizes the production without further ado, nobody suspects this brazen young rebel to become one of the most important post-war German filmmakers. Despite early setbacks, many of his films breakout at the most renowned films festivals and polarise audience, critics and filmmakers alike. His radical views and self-exploitation, as well as his longing for love, have made him one of the most fascinating film directors of this time.
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.
Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.
Isn’t the trajectory of a shared life determined in advance? Get married, have kids, be like everyone else… According to Dietrich Brüggemann, who competed in Vary six years ago, 30-somethings conceivably have it all, yet they fail in their attempts to achieve their set ideals. Nö delivers a critique of contemporary values, while also highlighting the struggle to find and nurture love.
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.