Germany

Quote:
“I’m your audience,” Ulrich Mühe confesses to an actress in a bar somewhere in the middle of The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), and he means it in two ways: one, he has seen her perform on the stage but two, he is a member of the Stasi, the secret police arm of the East German government whose stated goal is “to know everything”, and he has been keeping her and her playwright boyfriend under surveillance for some time. The Lives of Others is concerned with three things: ostensibly and obviously it tackles the effects of government oppression, specifically on the lives of artists, but on a subtler level it also addresses the transformative power of art and how our ordinary lives can be interpreted as narrative.Read More »

Sophia Magdalena Scholl (May 9, 1921 – February 22, 1943) was a prominent member of the White Rose non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich with her brother Hans. As a result, they were both executed by guillotine.

Since the 1970s, Scholl has been celebrated as one of the great German heroes who actively opposed the Third Reich during the Second World War.Read More »

road movie in which a racist skinhead is stuck in a car with a  black guy
by german feminist film maker Helke Sander

“Schwarz, weiß, doof!” – Mit diesem Spruch sagt die vorlaute Göre Jenny, was sie von ihren beiden ungewollten Mitreisenden hält. Einer davon ist der Skinhead “Dazlak”. Jenny las ihn vom Strassengraben auf, nachdem er sein Auto gegen einen Baum gesetzt hatte. zum “Dank” kotzt die Glatze den Rolls Royce ihres Chefs voll und demoliert die Scheinwerfer. Ein übler Zeitgenosse, jedenfalls auf den ersten Blick und für Leute, die sich selbst für “etwas Besseres” halten.
Unterwegs verstaut Jenny noch den farbigen Anhalter Kola auf dem Rücksitz, der sich in seiner Haut nicht gerade wohl fühlt neben dem vermeintlichen “Ausländerhasser”.
Genügend Sprengstoff also für eine turbulente Reise, die 24 Stunden später für Überraschungen sorgt und so manches Missverständnis korrigiert…Read More »

Synopsis:
The story of the legendary King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), his opera interest and friendship with theatre personalities such as Richard Wagner and Joseph Kainz, and at the same time a reflection of the German 1800s.Read More »

Synopsis:
Richard Wagner’s last opera has remained controversial since its first performance for its unique, and, for some, unsavory blending of religious and erotic themes and imagery. Based on one of the medieval epic romances of King Arthur and the search for the holy grail (the chalice touched by the lips of Christ at the last supper), it recounts over three long acts how a “wild child” unwittingly invades the sacred precincts of the grail, fulfilling a prophecy that only such a one can save the grail’s protectors from a curse fallen upon them. Interpreters of the work have found everything from mystical revelation to proto-fascist propaganda in it.Read More »

Director Hans-Jurgen Syberberg examines the rise and fall of the Third Reich in this brooding seven-hour masterpiece, which incorporates puppetry, rear-screen projection, and a Wagnerian score into a singular epic vision. Syberberg, who grew up under Nazi tyranny, ruminates on good and evil and the rest of humanity’s complicity in the horrors of the holocaust.Read More »

Quote:
There are places in Europe that have remained as painful memories of the past – factories where humans were turned into ash. These places are now memorial sites that are open to the public and receive thousands of tourists every year. The film’s title refers to the eponymous novel written by W.G. Sebald, dedicated to the memory of Holocaust. This film is an observation of the visitors to a memorial site that has been founded on the territory of a former concentration camp. Why do they go there? What are they looking for?Read More »

Synopsis wrote:
One of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era, Joe May’s Asphalt is a love story set in the traffic-strewn Berlin of the late 1920s. Starring the delectable Betty Amann in her most famous leading role, Asphalt is a luxuriously produced Ufa classic where tragic liaisons and fatal encounters are shaped alongside the constant roar of traffic.

thespinningimage.co.uk wrote:
In Berlin, a policeman called Holk is summoned to a jeweller’s shop, where a beautiful young woman has tried to steal a diamond. En route to the police station, the woman takes Holk back to her apartment on the pretext of collecting some papers and ends up seducing him. Soon he finds himself caught between his duty and the woman he is falling in love with.Read More »

One dramatic event marked the life of the great German artist in particular. At the beginning of the First World War she was already world famous for her etchings, lithographs, carvings and drawings. To her horror, her youngest son, Peter, volunteered to go to war. Within a few weeks she received the dreadful news Peter fell in Flanders. Käthe Kollwitz, who had always sided with the common people, became a committed pacifist and even a socialist. She lived with her husband, a doctor to the poor, in the Berlin working-class quarter of Prenzlauer Berg, where a central square is now named after her. The bloody end of the November Revolution destroyed her hope for swift improvements in living conditions, but strengthened her convictions. The excellently cast DEFA film shows impressive images from the life of a woman who was later to be a vehement foe of National Socialism and whose work still impresses the world today.Read More »