Short film commissioned by the Cinemathèque Suisse to celebrate Jean-Marie Straub’s 85th birthday. Directed by Jean-Claude Rousseau.

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“Der Herr auf Bestellung – the gentleman who can be booked” has the Weimar dream team of Walter Reisch as scriptwriter, Geza von Bolvary as director and most importantly, the incomparable Willi Forst as main actor.

This ‘musical burlesque’ tells about a stylish young gentleman (Willi Forst) who works as a so-called ‘Festredner’; an untranslatable term, it indicates a person who makes speeches at important events like marriages etc. for people who don’t feel able to do it themselves. Willi lends his voice to a speech-impaired professor (Paul Hörbiger), but the baroness (Trude Lieske) who falls in love with Hörbiger only does so because of Willi’s voice, and you can guess that this leads to all sorts of complications…Read More »

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I don’t hesitate to call “Das Lied ist aus” one of the great masterpieces of early German cinema. It is one of the best and most stylish of all the Weimar musical sound films, and it’s unusual for its strongly melancholic undertone and unhappy ending. It can also be regarded as one of the defining films for the team of actor Willi Forst, director Geza von Bolváry and scriptwriter Walter Reisch. Forst fully established his screen persona here: the witty, elegant, but also fragile and thoughtful gentleman, although he was a much too versatile actor to be pinned-down to such keywords. Forst is paired here with the equally stunning Liane Haid, very charming and womanly, and the chemistry these two have has rarely been achieved again in later films with Forst (but check out “Der Prinz von Arkadien” with the same team!).Read More »

Tateo is a young man living in a small rural village. He is a credit bank clerk, but his work is tedious. He tends to be interested in sex, but he does not quite fit in with the sexually loose milieu. The only thing he is really interested in is cinema. He dreams of becoming a screenwriter and writes some fragmentary scripts. But he cannot find any good subjects around him. Pretty much everything there is boring to him. One day, Tamami, his neighbour’s daughter, comes back from Osaka, where she worked in a cabaret. And things start slightly changing.Read More »

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A transgender punk-rock girl from East Berlin tours the U.S. with her band as she tells her life story and follows the former lover/band-mate who stole her songs.Read More »

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While perhaps too consciously schematic in its pairing of a black man and a blind white girl during an era of heightened racial awareness, this small film is a tender and moving story of friendship. Sidney Poitier stars as a man who befriends a blind girl (Elizabeth Hartman) he often sees in the park, and as he comes to understand the harshness of her family life, encourages her to reach out for a better life.Read More »

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Filmmaker William Greaves auditioned acting students for a fictional drama, while simultaneously shooting the behind-the-scenes drama taking place.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:
Seeing this singular 1968 American experimental feature by William Greaves a second time (on video; the first time was in 1980, in its original 35-millimeter format) has led me to value it more, though arguably the fact that it loses relatively little impact on video constitutes one of its limitations. Greaves, a pioneering black actor whose career stretches back to postwar films made for black audiences as well as the underrated Hollywood feature Lost Boundaries, went on to direct over 200 documentaries, host and executive produce NET’s Black Journal, and teach acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Read More »

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In the year 2020, a group of wealthy Moscovites travel to an abandoned astrophysics complex, rumoured to have enough power to halt the process of ageing.imdb

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About the film

The Target is the third project by REN Film and its founder Dmitry Lesnevsky, after Andrey Zvjagintzev’s The Return (the Golden Lion and the Lion of the Future at the 60th Venice Film Festival in 2003) and The Banishment (Golden Palm for Best Actor at the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2006).Read More »

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After promising 1100 employees that they would protect their jobs, the managers of a factory decide to suddenly close up shop. Laurent takes the lead in a fight against this decision.Read More »