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Harry Baer plays a newly released ex-convict who slowly but surely finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. Meanwhile, his attentions are torn between two women (Hanna Schygulla and Margarethe von Trotta) and the friend (Günther Kaufmann) who shot his brother. This sensual, artfully composed film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a study of romantic and professional futility.Read More »
Sterling Hayden, the semi-retired actor, war hero, and writer passes his days living on a barge in France. He enjoys telling anecdotes, until finally opening up about his alcoholism, loneliness, “creative impotency,” and deepest shame: publicly naming names in Hollywood during the Red Scare.Read More »
Leslie, a talented ballerina, has been having an almost incestuous relationship with her mother’s lover for quite some time. Torn between sexual desire and disgust, Leslie’s relationship with the tyrannical and voluptuous Maurice soon weighs on the (actually only pro forma) relationship between Maurice and Francine. One day, Leslie’s salvation comes in the form of the restless, roughly the same-age performance artist Brian. When both young people fall in love with each other, Maurice reacts jealously and Leslie has to decide with whom she wants to stay.Read More »
1779. Eight-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven, called “Louis”, is already known as a musical prodigy. He learns to go his own way – much to the dismay of the people around him. Some years later, he meets Mozart during times of political upheaval. The unconventional genius and French Revolution are sparking a fire in Louis’ heart; he doesn’t want to serve a master – only the arts. Facing times of family tragedies and unrequited love, he almost gives up. However, Louis makes it to Vienna to study under Haydn in 1792, and the rest is history. Who was this man, whose music has since touched countless hearts and minds? At the end of his life, the master is isolated by loss of loved ones and hearing. Surely though, he was way ahead of his times.Read More »
Berlin, Deutschlandhalle, November 20 th 1971. Kinski emerges into a lone spotlight on an empty stage. Shoulder length hair, plain jeans, a shirt with flower and polka dot patterns. No set, no stage effects, no costume. By reciting his own version of the New Testament’s “Jesus Christ Saviour”, he realizes a project well over 10 years in the making.
It is the time of the Hippie movement, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” is celebrating a sensational success in Germany as well. It is also a time of nonviolent resistance.Read More »
When her sibling Zara suffers a nervous breakdown, the introvert Eva is forced to take on Zara’s job as a Foley artist. She struggles to create sounds for a commercial featuring a horse, and then a horsetail starts growing out of her body. Empowered by her tail, she lures a botanist into an affair, through a game of submission. Piaffe is a visceral journey into control, gender, and artifice.Read More »
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The movie’s plot is based on the true story of a group of young computer hackers from Hannover, Germany. In the late 1980s the orphaned Karl Koch invests his inheritance in a flat and a home computer. At first he dials up to bulletin boards to discuss conspiracy theories inspired by his favorite novel, R.A. Wilson’s “Illuminatus”, but soon he and his friend David start breaking into government and military computers. Pepe, one of Karl’s rather criminal acquaintances senses that there is money in computer cracking – he travels to east Berlin and tries to contact the KGB.Read More »
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 »