Synopsis: Action takes place in a factory producing cables for barrage balloons shortly after the critical September days in 1938. British Intelligence try to discover the production secrets and one of their agents is very active in the factory. The agent plays on the vanity of the owner’s secretary, takes advantage of losses at the gaming tables of one of the firm’s employees and blackmails another. The son of the owner is led astray by the female accomplice of the British agent. The secretary’s courage together with the son’s patriotism finally unmasks the entire plot…Read More »
Quote: Sweet, 12 year-old Stefanie, played by child model Soraya Da Mota, dreams of attacking her parents with a flail. Not because they treat her particularly badly, you understand, but because, like any right minded-adolescent, Stefanie is rebelling against normality. As she escapes into a fantasy world, the boundaries between dream and reality blur until, real or not, Stefanie’s dad gets one hell of a birthday present.Read More »
Confectioner Mauritz is shot at close range. His wife, Thai woman Sita, whom he met two years ago through a marriage institute, is frightened and barely speaks German. Her five-year-old daughter, who she brought into the marriage, is also silent. The searches lead Commissioners Batic and Leitmayr to the Flügel Agency, that specialises in the placement of women with small children. Batic registers as an alleged customer with the institute.Read More »
Synopsis: ‘Vienna 1938. After Kristallnacht and the murder of his father, Ferry Tobler, a young Viennese Jew flees from the Nazis and profiteers of Vienna. He scrambles for various exit visas and entry permits, and finally arrives in Prague, where he meets an anti-Nazi German soldier who has escaped from Dachau and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris and eventually to Marseille, hoping to sail to a safe port.’ – National Center for Jewish FilmRead More »
Synopsis: The final installment in Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy, ‘Paradise: Hope’ tells the story of overweight thirteen-year-old Melanie and her first love. While her mother travels to Kenya (‘Paradise: Love’) and her aunt does missionary work (‘Paradise: Faith’), Melanie spends her summer vacation at a strict diet camp for overweight adolescents. Between physical education and nutrition counseling, pillow fights and her first cigarette, Melanie falls in love with the camp director, a doctor forty years her senior. As the doctor struggles with the guilty nature of his desire, Melanie had imagined her paradise differently.Read More »
Quote: Three young pals plan to earn money by shooting an hardcore-porno movie. But is it really so easy to shoot some gang-banging with home-video equipment?Read More »
Quote: In the middle of Vienna stands an old tenement building, and time has left its mark both on the house and its inhabitants. Here, time passes at a strange pace. Floor by floor, the visitor can discover small self-contained worlds: grousers, collectors, the forgotten, people with obsessions, concealed and exposed passions. Behind securely locked doors, each prepares his own heady brew. Then, however, death makes its entrance for the first time, sweeping through the stairwell. The owner of the house, a resident himself, dies. His nephew, an entrepreneur, inherits the building and acts immediately. He moves out, takes up lodgings, hands out notice to quit, renovates and devastates. One goal hovers before his eyes; to get rid of the tenants and make money out of the property. Gradually, the closed doors begin to open, and with each outrage committed by the new owner, the residents are drawn closer together. What comes to light thereby is an anthill full of life, and once it opens up, a flood of comical individuals streams out of it, all fighting for their own living space. A minor official, plagued by persecution mania, fears a dreadful end to the matter. Though the signs he sees of this are all wrong, nevertheless, in a furious finale, the outside world descends upon the house and his inhabitants.Read More »
Quote: Kurt Gerber, an intelligent high school student is in his senior year. He is burdend with personal and scholastic problems. Since his weak subject is math, Professor Kupfer who teaches his course and is also his class teacher, uses every occasion to humiliate the bright and self-assured boy. Even though the odds are against him, Kurt fights back and his struggle with the sadistic teacher develops into a matter of life and death. A faithful version of the best-seller novel by Friedrich Torberg which was published in 1930.Read More »
Quote: The caustic, satirical tone of Machorka-Muff is immediately evident, but successive viewings will reward spectators as they become more familiar with the nuances of Böll’s text—to which the film owes a great deal of its incisiveness—and will be more able to appreciate the precise orchestration executed by Straub and Huillet of the relations between sound and image, of tensions between voice, gesture, tempo, and action. The film’s opening—combining, in barely 48 seconds, extreme concision, lucid insight, and brutal parody—offers us an excellent example of this.
