1991-2000

“Schtonk!” is a satirical German movie, retelling the hoax of the Hitler Diaries.

Subtitled “Der Film zum Buch vom Führer” (“The film accompanying the Führer’s book”), the movie is a grotesque farce about the events when, in 1983, German Stern magazine began to publish, with great fanfare, the 60 volumes of the alleged diaries of Adolf Hitler – which two weeks later turned out to be entirely fake. That story is commonly described one of the greatest failures of modern journalism overall.Read More »

Paris –1943. Paris is going through one of the hardest winters of its history -occupied and tortured by the Germans, freezing and starving, the City of Light hardly deserves its name. But Sophie Vasseur only just witnesses that misery. She has been recruited as the accompanist of Irene Brice, an opera singer, one of the few ‘lights’ still shining in Paris. Her husband Charles, a brilliant and rich businessman who loves her passionately, efficiently supports her agents and sponsors in protecting her from the unbearable reality, and Sophie, the shadow, cuddles in the shelter.Read More »

An unusual and wonderful friendship develops between a busy but unhappy salesman and a resident of a mental asylum.Read More »

Still recuperating from his wife’s untimely death, a lawyer must defend his probably dirty brother-in-law, a stockbroker under investigation. He discovers that everyone has dark secrets, including himself.Read More »

In an intriguing long take static shot of the oppressively barren Siberian frontier, a converted tank (turned off-road passenger utility vehicle) traverses a rugged terrain that seemingly bisects a rural, indigenous village, disappears in a spray of displaced mud as it sinks partially out of frame into a trench, then momentarily re-emerges to continue on its plodding journey, only to become imperceptible from the horizon once again as it descends into a series of depressions on the gravel road. Watching this sequence (and film) again within the added context of having also seen Twentynine Palms, I couldn’t help but think that Bruno Dumont must somehow have been influenced by this unstructured and glacially paced, yet lucidly pure, challenging, and entrancingly reductive film by Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas, a feature that he developed from his earlier diploma film, Tolofaria on the nomadic, indigenous tribe.Read More »

A historical drama set in the 1950s, based on real-life events. Rosemarie Nitribitt comes out of a remand center, runs away from her foster parents, and ends up working as a barmaid in a Frankfurt nightclub. A wealthy French businessman offers to set her up in return for tape-recordings of her sex sessions with German VIPs.Read More »

The film follows the personal relationship between a father and his two sons, one of whom is a hit-man for the Russian mafia in Brooklyn.

Quote:
Harmonious yet cold as ice, “Little Odessa” is built through melancholy, kinship, and violence, violence that comes from every place, at any time, and against anyone and everyone. Once in contact with it, the vicious circle starts with a point of no return, leaving adversity and many casualties behind.Read More »

While attending their respective parent’s funeral in London, two strangers discover their parent’s secret love affair spanning across three decades and two continents.Read More »

The program director of a German TV station desperately looks for a new talk master for the Late Show.Read More »