Synopsis: Playboy Charly is picking up a young woman on the freeway – she is only wearing an orange overall and wants to go to Washington. Charly takes her with him to Munich, introducing her to his friend author Evers. Since Evers is negotiating with a US film producer about the rights to his novel, the mysterious woman stays with Evers. Soon, they get closer…Read More »
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Set just outside Stalingrad in the winter of 1942, this compelling wartime drama tells the tale of a contingent of German soldiers caught in a Russian vise. Headed by Gen. Paulus (Wilhelm Borchert), the other officers and foot soldiers are slowly surrounded by Russian troops on the offensive. The battles that ensue as a result of the entrapment are depicted via the experiences of individual officers and enlisted men — the full story emerges through the eyes of each of these soldiers. There is also a subsidiary tale about a friendship between a Russian woman (Sonia Zieman) and a German officer that ultimately saves the man’s life.Read More »
A young man stumbles through the Mexican Sierra, shot and half bled to death, carrying a suitcase containing the loot from a bank robbery. Passing out, he is found by Charles Dump, a former gold miner living on the outskirts of a ghost town with his daughter.Read More »
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Grisebach’s graduation film – her first full-length feature Mein Stern (2000), co-produced by the “Konrad Wolf” Academy of Film & Television in Potsdam-Babelsberg, ZDF and 3sat – met with immediate international recognition. It tells the story of a boy and a girl, both about 15, both played by inexperienced actors, who go through the canon and rituals of a first relationship, exploring each other’s bodies and experimenting with meaningful words. It is a marvelous interwoven picture of uncertain longing and the desire for adulthood. Mein Stern ran at festivals in Berlin, Locarno, Toronto, Chicago, London, Istanbul and Rotterdam in 2001, winning numerous prizes.Read More »
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Ratz wishes he could kill his father who is an Austrian Minister. At least virtually. He develops a computer game that allows him do so as often as he pleases. On the opposite path, we follow Jonas’ suspenseful journey who has devoted his entire life tracking the Nazi Official who killed his father and who, as the records state, is in hiding. One day, Mimi, Ratz’ first love, calls him up from New York to join her and renovate a cellar. She promises him in return to help him sell his video game. This will unexpectedly bring Ratz face to face with uncomfortable questions about history and his own filial relationships to his father.Read More »
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This film begins in the town of Palermo, where the film’s central figure, Nicola, is a young victim of Sicily’s high rate of unemployment. He decides to leave Palermo for Wolfsburg in Germany in search of employment. Along with Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1973), Schroeter’s film becomes one of a handful of films to broach the subject of the difficulties foreigners faced in their attempts to integrate into German society without the support of the family and community structures they had left behind in their home countries. Like Regno di Napoli, Palermo oder Wolfsburg follows a chronological structure, but Schroeter’s innovation in this film is to divide the narrative into three distinct sections or acts, each having their own particular style. Palermo oder Wolfsburg won the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980, notably the first Golden Bear ever awarded to a German director.Read More »
With Vampyr, Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer channeled his genius for creating mesmerizing atmosphere and austere, unsettling imagery into the horror genre. The result—a chilling film about a student of the occult who encounters supernatural haunts and local evildoers in a village outside of Paris—is nearly unclassifiable. A host of stunning camera and editing tricks and densely layered sounds create a mood of dreamlike terror. With its roiling fogs, ominous scythes, and foreboding echoes, Vampyr is one of cinema’s great nightmares.Read More »
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Jaberg and Hofmann’s film takes us on a cinematic journey through the life and work of Daniel Schmid, one of the most unusual artists within Swiss film. Born into a hotelier family of the 1940s in the village of Flims, surrounded by snow covered mountains, visited by exotic guests from around the world, Daniel Schmid always was a dreamer. The young filmmakers offer a mysterious kaleidoscope of people and places related to the director. Even as a child, Daniel Schmid knew that there was a hidden world, caught between reality and imagination.Read More »
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This is an excellent hour-and-a-half documentary overview of Fassbinder’s career. For those new to the director, this is the perfect starting place (perhaps even before watching the films).Read More »