Germany

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Harun Farocki films Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet at work during the shooting of Klassenverhältnisse (Class Relations), a film based on Kafka’s unfinished novel, Amerika, in which Farocki himself plays the character, Delamarche. The film is both a tribute to the work of the two filmmakers, who define themselves as “artisans” in reaction against the film industry, and as he says, a self-portrait: at work, directed by the couple, he endlessly repeats his gestures and lines, like a worker up to the point of exhaustion.Read More »

The Lincoln Center wrote:
Straub and Huillet were frequently drawn to unfinished texts—Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron—and for Class Relations, one of their supreme accomplishments, they turned to Kafka’s never-completed Amerika. “Kafka, for us,” Straub declared, “is the only major poet of industrial civilization, I mean, a civilization where people depend on their work to survive.” Kafka never did visit the America of his novel, so perhaps it’s fitting that the saga of Karl Rossmann, a teenage immigrant from Europe who arrives to a strange new land rife with swindlers and hypocrites, was largely shot in Hamburg. The style of Straub-Huillet, with their Brechtian performances, long takes, and static framing, is often characterized as “austere,” yet such a description belies the extraordinary richness of their images, the palpable weight of their direct-sound, and the invigorating clarity of their political commitment.Read More »

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First feature produced in Switzerland. Film deals with abortion, in two parts: first, fictional part addresses the social aspects; second, documentary part addresses the dangers of clandestine abortions. Film concludes with a eulogy to maternity.Read More »

“Janine and Nadine have a close and symbiotic friendship. They share a flat together with their friends Mark and Andreas. The flat share is a universe with its own rules, languages, manners and relationships. A stimulating place, where chaos is floating through corridors and rooms. Pending over everything is the approaching breakup of the community, which becomes more and more perceptible within short moments of silence. One of the flat mates, Janine, is going to leave. Janine’s farewell party affects each of her friends in a different way. A precise description of a fragile structure breaking apart.”Read More »

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In 1960s Germany, criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse uses hypnotized victims and the surveillance equipment of a Nazi-era bugged hotel to steal nuclear technology from a visiting American industrialist.Read More »

The institute that this film is about existed twice. Once as the top-secret Institute for Physical Problems as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which was in operation from 1938 to 1968, and a second time as the largest film set in Europe, which was destroyed at the end of the project. The DAU Institute in Kharkiv was an experiment designed by director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy in which leading mathematicians, artists, philosophers and mystics lived and worked between 2009 and 2011. Among other things, they explored the foundations and limits of intellectual understanding and human action, working towards the creation of a “new human being” and beyond, to the bloody end. Read More »

Natasha and Olga work in the canteen of a secret Soviet research institute. This is the beating heart of the DAU universe, everyone drops in here: the institute’s employees, scientists and foreign guests, like Luc Bigé. Natasha begins an affair with him, but not before she and Olga have a lengthy talk about love which puts them at loggerheads. In her bathtub and during jovial drinking games, Natasha ponders her lovers and describes the Frenchman as being “gentle”. But the secret service, headed by Vladimir Azhippo, intervenes. For Natasha (and us) this is an “ungentle” experience. Even those who know nothing about Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU project – a large-scale simulation of the totalitarian system under Stalin and after – will be able to recognise in the artistic and political dimensions of DAU. Read More »

Synopsis:
A strange case baffles the police and the citizens of a German small town. A two-year old girl has disappeared. There are suspects, innocents, guilty ones and a web of lies. It’s saturday afternoon, and Achim’s parents are invited for a topping-out ceremony. The neighbour’s daughter, Monika (Renate Roland), is the babysitter for Achim (Sascha Urchs) and his little sister Kathrin, but Monika doesn’t take the job too serious. She’d rather go for a ride with her boyfriend. Through a unforeseen row of circumstances, Achim becomes the murderer of his sister, and hides the body in a wrecked car on the scrapyard. When the parents return home, a frantic search for the little child begins. Only the father (Sieghardt Rupp) seems to know the truth…Read More »

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Aeronautic engineer Graham Dorrington tries his hand at a journey towards the massive waterfalls of Kaieteur, in the heart of Guyana, hoping that his helium airship will make it successfully over the treetops. His undertaking is not without risks: twelve years earlier, a similar expedition that attempted to fly over a rainforest habitat in Sumatra had culminated in the tragic death of Dieter Plage, a friend of Dorrington. Werner Herzog is among the protagonists of the expedition, embarking in a new dirigible prototype to observe the lost world of this uncontaminated rainforest, one of the least explored territories on the planet.Read More »