Germany

A fascinating doco with loads of file footage of the Nazi conception of the cinematic arts.Read More »

This is the fairy tale of someone who went out in search of a rabbit and discovered the world along the way. So a children’s fairy tale? A fairy tale for adults about a child. Or about the happiness that a child can still conquer while we have blocked our way there. That we might still be able to conquer if we regain the belief that it is not lost forever. A film about paradise rediscovered? No, from the hope that paradise was never entirely lost. The film begins with eight-year-old Marcel waking up after his father has run away and his mother is spending the night with her boyfriend. The boy makes his own breakfast and feeds the rabbit that is camping in the old cot. A child left alone in a world they trust.Read More »

A minor character from a collection of marionettes takes viewers through a small world theatre where they come across various types, including the seducer, the demagogue and the obedient masses.
Ambitious puppet animation with a didactic and political purpose against propaganda methods.Read More »

Wanting to start a new life, 40-year-old Heli has found an institution in which she can put her younger, mentally disabled sister. Her three egocentric brothers have agreed to the plan and come to share their sister’s final weekend at the house where they all grew up on the outskirts of Berlin.Read More »

Biologie! was one of very few East German feature films to address environmental issues.

In a small East German town shortly before the fall of the Wall, Ulla, a sensitive and principled 10th-grader, meets computer-obsessed Winfried, son of a chemical plant manager. On a field trip with her biology class, Ulla discovers that a trout farm and weekend homes are being built illegally in a local conservation area. The situation gets complicated when she discovers that Winfried’s family is responsible.
Ulla nevertheless passionately agitates to stop the construction project, even soliciting Winfried to help her create a touched-up photograph of a rare bird as “evidence” that the conservation area is home to an endangered species. When Ulla’s deception is discovered, she faces serious consequences.Read More »

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Based on Herman Bang’s 1902 novel of the same name, Dreyer’s film is a fascinating fin-de-siècle study of a “decadent” elderly artist (Benjamin Christensen) driven to despair by his relationship with his young protégé and former model, Michael (Walter Slezak). With suffocatingly sumptuous production design by renowned architect Hugo Häring (his only film work), this Kammerspiel, or “intimate theatre”, foreshadows Dreyer’s magnificent final film Gertrud, by forty years with its “Now I may die content, for I have seen great love” epigraph.Read More »

Shot on location in West Beriln, Nordstrand and Heiligensee, Sept/Oct 1986 and March 1987

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Cult movie ‘Nihil oder Alle Zeit der Welt’ from 1987, featuring the members of Einstürzende Neubauten as actors. It’s a film about a group of young ‘Terrorists’ (Neubauten), fighting desperately against an obscure ‘professor’, that represent a personification of all things bad and ugly in today’s civilization.
-tarantullashop.comRead More »

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The distinguished German writer Uwe Johnson (1934-1984) lived for several years in the 1960s on Manhattan’s Upper Westside. His publisher, Harcourt Brace, had hired him as a textbook editor for their German-language school book editions, which allowed him to stay in New York and also tend to his own writing. In his spare time he got to know his neighborhood very well, observing the goings on in the streets, cafeterias, and parks. In 1968 German Television agreed to coproduce a film with us in which Uwe Johnson would, on-camera, introduce and question the various characters with whom he exchanges news and opinions on his wanderings on the Upper West Side. We proposed to him that he participate in the documentary. Being essentially introverted he was not interested in the on-camera concept, but was willing to make a list of places and situations that he felt should be included in the film. Christian Blackwood took charge of the project. Johnson wrote the narration once the film was edited. It was broadcast in Germany at the time.Read More »

Plot:
A would-be novelist with no ideas of his own mines the tragedies of an unsuspecting woman to his advantage in this drama. Robert (Ulrich Matthes) is a college professor and struggling writer living in Konstanz, a town in Southern Germany. Robert has been working on a novel for years, but beyond a rough idea about life in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, he has no worthwhile ideas and doesn’t have much to show for his efforts; as Robert edges into his mid-forties, he’s begun to worry his literary career will never get off the ground. Robert happens to meet a young woman named Inga (Anna Maria Muehe) who was raised by her grandparents after her mother died soon after she was born; Robert senses there’s something in her story that would make for a good novel, and he begins drawing her out, trying to find out more about her and her childhood that he can use as source material for his book. As Robert digs deeper, it becomes clear he’s learned a few things about Inga’s past that she doesn’t know — and not everything she’s been told about her mother is the truth. Novemberkind (aka November Child) was the first feature film from writer and director Christian Schwochow.Read More »