Germany

German actress Maria Schrader subsequently became well-known as the director of the prize-winning 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. But in this 2016 feature film her considerable directing talents are already on clear display as she portrays Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s years of exile after 1936, moving between Buenos Aires, New York, and Brazil in search of a new home.

Zweig, whose writings inspired the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe between the wars. Schrader shows him struggling with life as a nomad and with his separation from the homeland whose language had always nourished him. Though in despair at the collapse of European civilisation, Zweig hesitates to publicly denounce the Nazi regime…Read More »

Bibi comes to her aunt Toni’s boarding house where she is seduced by lesbian women. Soon, no one is safe from her insatiable hunger.Read More »

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Noted Georgian filmmaker Dito Tsintsadze directs this darkly-humorous urban drama about the desperate lives of illegal immigrants in Mannheim, Germany. Lan (Nicole Seelig) is a Vietnamese prostitute whose rotting teeth and odd affliction, which causes her to turn comatose after an orgasm, is impeding her marketability. She soon finds herself in an unlikely romance with Haitian Carlos (Elie James Blezes), who schemes to sell his kidney for enough money to immigrate to Australia. Meanwhile, tyro hitmen Branko (Misel Maticevic) and Merab (Lasha Bakradze) dilly-dally with their assignment to kill a businessman. Merab bores his Croatian counterpart by regaling him with stories about his native Georgia — in between vomiting out of anxiety.Read More »

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Starting in the 1960s in the Bay Area, artist Bruce Nauman made sculptures from nonart materials like dirt, neon, polyester resin and burlap. With a fertile, almost frenzied creativity, Nauman also pioneered video installations and body art. Now something of a recluse, living in New Mexico, Nauman continues to exert art-world influence. Last year, UC Press published a comprehensive volume about his early period, A Rose Has No Teeth. The book, however, lacked a companion DVD—too much of Nauman’s art depends on time and movement to be captured in static illustrations. Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think, a 66-minute 1997 film by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, now available from Facets, provides that missing link. Read More »

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Anti-semitic Nazi propaganda “biography” of the Rothschilds, a German Jewish family whose members rose to the top of the European banking community during the Napoleonic era.Read More »

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Kleist’s Penthesilea is certainly one of the most extraordinary plays in the German of the German dramatic repertoire. It is about the the wild and destructive passion that seizes the Queen of the Amazons and Achilles, the Achilles, the Greek hero, under the walls of Troy. Revulsed by its violence and strangeness -only in the 20th century did people realise the extent of this work – Goethe was and condemned it. Edith Clever brings out the full power of this of this feverish text.Read More »

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History of the legal scandal involving the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus who was convicted of treason and sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in 1894 because of an anti-Semitic conspiracy in the war ministry. Supported by the writer Emile Zola Dreyfus’s wife Lucie fights for his release. In 1899, the verdict against Dreyfus was repealed and shortly after, Dreyfus was pardoned. But it took another six years until Dreyfus was fully exonerated. (filmportal.de)Read More »

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3 AMERICAN LP’S was the first film I did with Peter Handke. It was a film about American music, about three pieces of three LP’s. There was a song by Van Morrison, another by Harvey Mandel, and one of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

It was mainly the music and some shots out of a car, landscapes out of the car window. And it had a little bit of commentary – dialogue between Peter and me about American music and about how American rock music was about emotion and images instead of sounds. That is to say, about a kind of phenomenon, that it was in a way a kind of film music, but without a moving picture.Read More »

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‘Four directors – four styles – four episodes, all relating the events of a single night which has entered the history books: August 12-13, 1961. There are thousands of complex narratives connected with the frontier drawn through the middle of Berlin and each episode relates the story of a difficult decision made on that night.Read More »