Germany

Carl Celler (CC) Culture Institute specializes in selling art projects to big companies: Carl Celler, the dynamic boss with an inherent melancholic drift towards failure, feels that his first project proves to be a difficult one. For the project, he invited a young elite group of artists and curators to Berlin to realize a project: videos, photos, campaigns, and art objects about a specific topic, namely brand logos and animals. The invited artists are furnished with a sufficient budget and insight into Berlin’s arts milieu. Furthermore there are two male (anti-)models, Kai and Jork, arbitrarily chosen, non-styled, people from the street. Kai is over 30 and he confronts this world with nonchalance. He feels his late juvenile attitude is in anger and the ambition he encounters in CC takes him by surprise. Rena Yazka, one of the invited artists, catches his attention. Their little flirt is the background for Kai’s experience to become an object, to be regarded as a body. Is he in love – or only eroticized in this dazzling experience? Is he exploited and abused by the creative industry? The mood of this bizarre, tightened coolness gives way slowly to an existential problem. What kind of life are they working for, or, if they live for their work, what kind of life is that? (IMDb)Read More »

Kemal Kayankaya, a private detective, was hired by a Turkish women, Ilter, to search for his husband, Amend, who has been missing since the death of her father, Vassif. Unknownst to him, he was about to unravel the secrets of his client’s family, as well as their various dealings with the underworld and the police. Moreover, being a Turk raised in a German foster family, he has also begun to understand and accept his own ethnicity.Read More »

German plot description:
Polizeimeisteranwärterin Ariane Fink aus Dortmund verschlägt es ausgerechnet nach Starnberg: gesichtsloses Städtchen, Wahnsinnssee. Höchste Millionärsdichte Bayerns. Eine Idylle mit Reißzähnen.

Und eben hier wird Ariane gleich an ihrem ersten Arbeitstag mit dem bayerischsten aller Klischees konfrontiert: Der tote Kini, oder besser gesagt, ein Wiedergänger von ihm, liegt am Ufer des Starnberger Sees, und zwar genau da, wo Ludwig II. 1886 ins Wasser ging.Read More »

Quote:
“The film is a melodrama in the high Sirk style (Leander is a cabaret singer in 1840s London who takes the rap when her lover passes a bad check and gets deported to the penal compound that was then Australia), but with a great deal of music, performed by Leander in the wrenchingly emotional style that has made her as much of an icon to German gays as Garland is to the US community.”Read More »

Umay is a young woman of Turkish descent, fighting for an independent and self-determined life in Germany against the resistance of her family. Her struggle initiates a dynamic, which results in a life-threatening situation.Read More »

Quote:
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brazen depiction of the alternating currents of lethargy and mayhem inherent in moviemaking, a film crew—played by, and not so loosely based on, his own frequent collaborators—deals with an aloof star (Eddie Constantine), an abusive director (Lou Castel), and a financially troubled production. Inspired by the hellish process of making Whity earlier the same year, this is a vicious look at behind-the-scenes dysfunction.Read More »

Synopsis:

Two soldiers–searching the Sahara for Atlantis–are captured by raiders from the lost city. They are taken before its beautiful queen who has over 50 mummified ex-lovers! What follows is an endless nightmare, climaxing with the murder of one of the soldiers. There are some brilliant moments in this sci-fi fantasy classic.

A pair of Legionnaires discover the remains of the lost city of Atlantis in the middle of the Sahara desert. It is ruled by a strange and beautiful demi-goddess. (guess who).Read More »

Quote:
Premiered at Toronto Film Festival, UFO In Her Eyes is a cinematic adaptation of her most recent novel of the same title. The film stars Shi Ke and Udo Kier and is a political metaphor recounted through the phantasmagoric transformation that befalls a small Chinese village after an alleged UFO sighting. Inspired by Soviet cinema, Xiaolu Guo dedicated this film to Soy Cuba, a 1964 Soviet-Cuban film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. The movie’s score is composed by the Somali-Canadian musician Mocky and produced by Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin. It received the Public Award at Milan 3-Continental Film Festival 2013.Read More »

Review from DVDTalk:
My first introduction to the oddball cinema of Spanish filmmaker Jesus ‘Jess’ Franco came one night about 3am while channel surfing in my parent’s basement. I’d just gotten back from college, it was time for the summer break, and I’d only minutes beforehand returned from an evening at the pub. I came across what appeared to be a pair of lesbian vampires doing their thing set to a be-bopping score and some whacked out colors and it instantly caught my attention. I didn’t really know what I was watching and didn’t find out until the film was finished that it was one of Franco’s most popular films, Vampyros Lesbos. That semi-intoxicated late night initiation led me to seek out more of the man’s work, and since that night over ten years ago I’ve become a casual fan of his wildly uneven catalogue of work. His films may not always be good in the traditional sense of the word, but they’re always interesting and there’s always a little piece of himself put into his work.Read More »