Synopsis:
Detective Harder takes on her first case after surviving a bomb attack during a police training mission in Afghanistan. The remains of a girl are discovered in a moor near the small German town of Friedland. But Harder’s investigation falters from the outset – not least due to the discovery of a live bomb dating to the Second World War, which throws the Friedlanders and Harder herself into turmoil.Read More »
Synopsis: During the Russian campaign, a military pastor was to assist Private Baranowski, who was sentenced to death for his desertion, on his last night. It is also the last night before the departure for Stalingrad that the soldiers know that it means certain death. The pastor leaves his room to a captain so that he can meet his fiancé again. He himself remains in Baranowski’s cell and struggles with his conscience and emotion – even more than when he learns that the young doomed man fled for love. But the execution is carried out, and a member of the firing squad finds only cynical words for the fate of the soldier.Read More »
In the countryside, somewhere in the Bavarian Nowhere. Kirchenwirt Alois is financially up to his neck. His restaurant runs extremely bad, and only the bailiff regularly looks at him.Read More »
Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality.Read More »
In a deserted mining town at the end of nowhere three desperate men fight over a suitcase full of cash.Read More »
Synopsis:
An attempt to illuminate the basic relationship between man and woman. A series of individual examples show how they get to know each other, how they fall in love, how they have their first arguments, how they discover difficulties in communication, and how they end up living together. The snapshots from everyday life are ciphers for the entire lack of contact of those who are closest to each other, whose only desired goal is to remain silent together. Because words destroy feeling, sensation, relationship, substance. The phrase has become the real, it replaces the lost ego. Understanding without understanding, routine instead of togetherness. What still takes place is the monologue, the soliloquy, the idiom. The anxious question will be: and what comes after that? Probably the same thing, over and over again.Read More »
Quote:
Retired filmmaker Abraham Rabenthal (Vadim Glowna) is producing the directorial début feature (titled Ins Blaue) for his daughter Nike (Alice Dwyer), and they film around Neapolitan locales with their cast and crew. Nike’s film is about three young women travelling in a camper van through Italy and having individual adventures with men along the way. Eva hooks up with a monk, Josephine with a mute fisherman, and Laura, an old philosopher. After a bank rejects Abraham’s application for further funding, costs need to be cut, so two of the male characters – the monk and the fisherman, are played by the same cast member Wilhelm, and the old philosopher, by Abraham himself. But that’s when things get more complicated…Read More »
Quote:
A hitchhiker, carrying a suitcase full of toys, is given a ride by a wealthy businessman in his 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 Convertible. The two first talk about the businessman’s life and the hitchhiker’s hobby of collecting toys. Then everything gets out of hand.Read More »
