Considered one of the most significant films of DEFA, the state-run East German film studio, Goya is a monumental 70mm production directed by one of East Germany’s leading directors, Konrad Wolf, who won a Special Jury Prize at the 1971 Moscow International Film Festival for this work which was also nominated for the festival’s Golden Prize. The film is based on a 1951 novel by the German-Jewish exile author Lion Feuchtwanger. Goya is one of ten East German films originally shot in 70mm.

Painter Francisco Goya stood astride the world of the old masters and the world of the modern, painting as he did in the late 18th and early 19th century. Konrad Wolf’s biopic shows the artist (played by Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis (The Red Tent, Solyaris)) in his later years, grappling with creative issues and multiple women and pondering just how outrageous he can be without having to have a conversation with the Inquisition. He believes in King and Church, yet he is also a Spaniard who dearly loves his people. This contradiction presents him with a dilemma.

Goya.1971.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 8 min
Size: 	1.97 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	702x336 ~> 739x336
Aspect ratio:  	2.2:1
Frame rate: 	29.970 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.283
Audio
#1:  	German 5.1ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/5493A451743C2E6/Goya.1971.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Konrad Wolf – Goya – oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis AKA Goya, or the Hard Way to Enlightenment (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Director Konrad Wolf’s gritty and controversial tale follows two young women who go to work at a uranium mine in Wismut, East Germany. With anarchists, former S.S. soldiers, and ex-Russian officers working in close proximity, the mine becomes a microcosm of world politics and social unrest.

Sun.Seekers.1971.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 50 min
Size: 	1.70 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	706x480 ~> 706x529
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.236
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/41A62B1F7CF19F1/Sun.Seekers.1971.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English, German

The post Konrad Wolf – Sonnensucher AKA Sun Seekers (1971) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In this film, Wolf and scriptwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase explore the role of art and the artist in socialist society. A sculptor questions the reception and value of his work, in a delicately nuanced narrative interweaving personal memories, historical dilemmas, and political defeats.

Der.nackte.Mann.auf.dem.Sportplatz.1974.REPACK.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-3ArOBOP.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 37 min
Size: 	9.34 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1800x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	13.6 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.279
Audio
#1:  	German 2.0ch AAC LC @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/3B07381AB329E52/Der.nackte.Mann.auf.dem.Sportplatz.1974.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-3ArOBOP.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Konrad Wolf – Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz AKA The Naked Man in the Stadium (1974) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis:
‘The authorities expect the case of Friedel Walter, alias “Dr. Müller,” to be a straightforward one: he was working as a doctor without proper credentials under a false name. But Mehlin, the man in charge of his case, knows that there is more to the story. When he was injured fleeing from a concentration camp, resistance worker Irene asked her medical student boyfriend Walter to give him medical care…’
– DEFA Film Library

1.46GB | 1h 41mn | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6EC088EDE5988C7/Genesung.1956.DVDRip.x264.AC3.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/E1C5E679793E743/Genesung_(1956).srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Konrad Wolf – Genesung AKA Recovery (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Der kleine Prinz (1966/1972) has been even more thoroughly buried by history than the rest of Wolf’s work, or the corpus of DEFA production in general. The reasons for this neglect are multiple on the one hand, the film got caught in the crossfire of the Eleventh Plenum, which took place during the shooting of the film. Although the project had been conceived of as a vehicle for the eventual launch of color TV in the GDR (an undertaking that was repeatedly started and stopped), Heinz Adamock (1921-2010), Intendant of the DFF from 1954 to 1989, sought to get out of his commitment to fund the film, until Albert Wilkening insisted he honor it. The film is thus an unwitting document of noncooperation between film and television at a time of political crisis. On the other hand, rights were not requested from the author’s family until the film’s completion, and could not be obtained. As a result, the film was not shown until May 21. 1972 on GDR television, and after that not again until 1995; only with the expiration of the copyright term in 2015 did it enter public domain and was given special showings at the Brottfabrik in Berlin in June 2015. Saint-Exupéry’s story has become a minor classic of children’s litterature. It begins with the narrator telling of how he once drew a boa constrictor eating an elephant, which was misinterpreted by adults as a drawing of a hat. (This vignette may have inspired a later episode in Der Nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz, where the hero’s son gets into trouble in school for drawing a horse on a submarine.) The narrator (Eberhard Esche) crashes his plane in the Sahara and meets the Little Prince (Christel Bodenstein, Wolf’s then-wife), who tells him about his life over the next eight days. The Prince comes from a remote planet, and has left to explore the universe, meeting up with various figures: a king with no subjects, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter who pointlessly lights and extinguishes a lamp, over and over, and a geographer. Before the pilot is able to repair his plane and leave, there are further parabolic stories of a snake, a desert flower, and a fox
The film’s delay in exhibition makes for an unusual degree of archival latency in the film, even more than in the case of the Kaninchenfilme that were at least shown in the last months of the GDR’s existence. Der kleine Prinz is mentioned in none of the literature on DEFA children’s films. Not only is the film historically obscure: it does not fit easily within the rest of the director’s oeuvre either (Jacobsen and Aurich call it a “Fremdkörper” or “alien body”). Reviews were muted when it was shown in 1972. When the film was brought out of the vaults to celebrate Christel Bodenstein’s seventieth birthday in 2008, a reviewer saw it as “eher eine verfilmte Theateraufführung” (more like a filmed theater performance”) and added, “Er wirkt statuarisch, kühl, die Typologie der Gestalten ist ganz und gar der literarischen Vorlage entnommen, er findet zu keiner filmischen Interpretation. Ein Film, der sich stark auf das Wort des Dichters konzentriert.” (It has a statuary, cool effect; the typology of the figures is completely derived from the literary basis, and no filmic interpretation is reached. A film that is strongly concentrated on the word of the poet.
The criticisms were made by one of the only scholarly essays devoted to the film, a graduating senior’s thesis from the Hochschule für Film und Fernschen from 1987. Due to the “sehr distanzierte Kamcraführung,” “man hat den Eindruck, dass Konrad Wolf die Ereignisse mehr ausstellt, um nicht an die Realität der dargestelten Phantasiegebilde zu glauben, sondern nur um den Parabelcharakter zu rezipicren. […] Konrad Wolf “zeigt” Saint-Exupérys Kleines Prinsen, aber er schafft nicht seinen eigenen Kleinen Prinzen mit Filmbildern.”(One has the impression that Konrad Wolf prefers to exhibit the events in order not to believe in the reality of the represented fantasy-images, but only to acknowledge the parabolic character […] Konrad Wolf shows Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, but he does not create his own Little Prince with filmic images.)
Not only is the magical story shown in extremely distanced and text-dominated fashion, but Wolf felt obliged to frame it with an added prologue and postlude, showing the pilot’s plane over the desert and linking the entire story to the author’s mysterious disappearance during his last reconnaissance flight in 1944. After a typewriter punches out the facts of Saint-Exupéry’s own wartime flights in Courier script, as if reported by a war correspondent, we hear Manfred Krug’s voice singing a ballad penned by Wolf’s frequent collaborator Paul Wiens, as the screen shows us topical documentary photographs of then-contemporary anti-imperialist struggle in Vietnam and elsewhere. The juxtaposition feels forced, to put it mildly. It is thus hard to make the case that this is a forgotten masterpicce of children’s film, and yet one senses that one’s judgment may also be affected by the film’s historical obscurity, its lack of reception or resonance.

(From : Larson Powell The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution)

1.21GB | 1h 12mn | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/82AA0FC524E275E/Der_kleine_Prinz.mkv

Language:German
Subtitles:English

The post Konrad Wolf – Der kleine Prinz (1966) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
A story about the rise of Nazism based on a novel by a German-Jewish author who managed to survive by fleeing to the USA. The movie focuses on working class Berliner Lissy Schroeder who marries clerk Alfred Frohmeyer believing he can provide her with a better life. In 1932, however, his Jewish boss fires him. So Alfred turns to the Nazis, quickly rising in the SA, and acquiring wealth along the way. Lissy, however, discovers there is, as always, a price. The Nazis shoot her brother, a former Communist. And her parents and friends shun her. What is she to do?

1.27GB | 1h 25mn | 762×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9E90A72E1D4FF35/Lissy_(Konrad_Wolf,_1957)_DVDRip_x264__Multisubs_.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles:German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Indonesian (vobsubs in MKV container)

The post Konrad Wolf – Lissy (1957) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

While recovering from a mental breakdown, the young Rita Seidel recalls the last two years, in which she fell in love with Manfred, a chemist who is ten years older. As Manfred became disillusioned with his opportunities in East Germany, he moved to the West. Rita followed him there and tried to persuade him to return but soon realized he would never do it. Rita comes to terms with the past and decides to concentrate on her work and the building of a socialist society. Although some of the characters are shown as overzealous in their support of the regime, for obvious reasons the nature of the East German dictatorship is never depicted or discussed. The Stasi, the all-pervasive secret police headed by the director’s brother Markus Wolf, is not mentioned. The film is set in the period immediately before the erection of the Berlin Wall.

The script was adapted from Christa Wolf’s novel Divided Heaven, released in 1963. The film was removed from circulation on several occasions in the following years, when the Socialist Unity Party of Germany decreed it, depending on the political situation. In 1995, a group of historians and cinema researchers chose Divided Heaven as one of the 100 most important German films ever made. (Wikipedia)

1.59GB | 1h 53mn | 1021×454 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/7AFE2BDFE186F97/Der_geteilte_Himmel.mkv

Language(s):German
Subtitles: English (default), French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Korean muxed

The post Konrad Wolf – Der geteilte Himmel AKA The Divided Heaven (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.