German

Quote:
A small town in Germany in the early 70s. Hille, the son of the local preacher, tries for the second time to graduate high school. Despite sophisticated efforts at memorization, he knows he won’t succeed this time either. At the same time other, more ominous problems occur: a choir girl thinks he impregnated her. His sister Dimuth, allegedly a successful model, returns from Rome followed by her pimp. The Silesian bell festival his father is planning threatens to become a political disaster. The impending doom spreads. Dimuth’s former classmate Uli, an apprentice at the local sewage plant, discovered tumorous swans and dead fish in the river, then drowns mysteriously in its polluted waters. Two students hiding in the bell tower of the church plan a terror attack.Read More »

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From the panoramic, historical revue of the many faces of social prejudice and ostracism, Ottinger turns her attention to the mechanism of exclusion invested with the necessary power to make or break people. Frau Dr. Mabuse, whose illustrious precursor is Fritz Lang’s psychopathic, counterfeiting boss of the underworld, derives her power from the fabrication of reality based on the seduction of images and words. Her perfect object and victim is the Bauhaus-dandy Dorian, whose relation to Oscar Wilde’s prototype is as marginal as his relation to power. The fairy-tale framework of Ottinger’s feature compositions asserts itself strongly in this film as Dorian replaces the evil tycoon and becomes king of the media conglomerate.Read More »

Quote:
In 1923, sensing the gathering storm of “fear, danger, and catastrophe” in Germany, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote a devastatingly prescient and heartbreaking letter to his former friend, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Schoenberg aligned his fate with that of all Jews, knowing they were soon to face exile or violent death. Straub-Huillet’s film, a recitation both of Schoenberg’s letter and Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 speech to the International Congress in Defense of Culture, is a fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism, German crimes against humanity, and the barbaric war machine of capitalism.
—MoMARead More »

Quote:
In 1923, sensing the gathering storm of “fear, danger, and catastrophe” in Germany, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote a devastatingly prescient and heartbreaking letter to his former friend, the painter Wassily Kandinsky. Schoenberg aligned his fate with that of all Jews, knowing they were soon to face exile or violent death. Straub-Huillet’s film, a recitation both of Schoenberg’s letter and Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 speech to the International Congress in Defense of Culture, is a fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism, German crimes against humanity, and the barbaric war machine of capitalism.
—MoMARead More »

“Don’t be scared,” he’d whisper, “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just the hollow people.” Peter Nestler has made a film based on Israeli author and scriptwriter Etgar Keret’s short story “The Hollow Men”. a man’s memories of his childhood, marked by the fear of bodiless voices and masks. A beautiful and terrible miniature at the same time.Read More »

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In conurbations where hundreds of thousands live alongside one another, in the era of a highly technological society, in which communication has never played such a significant role, man has become lonely. Disappointed by his fellow human beings, he turns to animals. Dogs and other domestic animals serve him as companions, life partners, cuddly objects and bedfellows.Read More »

“Bis daß der Tod euch scheidet” is the story of a couple whose mad love for each other smashes headlong into the husband’s patriarchal value system. Based on a true story.Read More »

The story tells of a travelling saleslady who gets a younger rival from her boss and is doomed to be mobbed out. However the new girl soon discovers that she also is only a plaything for the boss and after a rough start the two women come together and play a bit Thelma and Louise …Read More »

Synopsis:
An attempt to observe life from the outside – to gain distance, to not interfere, to just observe. Two young women sitting in a café on a summer day, a family arriving at the airport, an older woman sitting alone in a train, adult children standing in front of the hospital where their father is dying. Situations found everyday, a thousand times over. But what happens when you try to depict this normality?Read More »