German

In the year 1991 five astronauts (three Americans, one European, one Russian) return to Earth from a presumably failed space expedition to the Jupiter moon Ganymed. Nobody expects their arrival any more and their radio signals remain unheard. They are landing far off civilization, in a vast desert. On their way through the rough landscape they don’t encounter any signs of life, just abandoned buildings and a plane wreck. Suspicious among them grows. Is mankind extinct after a nuclear war? Tension increases. When one of the Americans kills the Russian (because only Russians could have started a World War), the group slowly begins to fall apart.Read More »

Storyline
Comedy about a film crew shooting a movie about guns and robbers, when real robbers turn up. Having to go home in robbers costume, they are mistakingly accused. In the end the real robbers are brought to justice.Read More »

Quote:
When you play with clichés, you have to be very careful that they don’t backfire; the little things have a way of maiming almost everything around them.

Daniel Schmid’s “La Paloma” — which was shown last night and to be repeated tonight at the New York Film Festival — is intentionally crammed with cultural chestnuts, and also makes a heavy pass at the plots of “Camille” and “La Traviata.” Kitsch and camp collide in this storm of pity and terror and wonder, which seethes with boundless love, burning glances, and unfathomable revenge.Read More »

Investigative journalist Fabian Groys enjoys great freedom since the stories he uncovers make for strong sales. He works for a political news magazine in their Berlin head office. In this context, his arrogance raises few eyebrows.Read More »

Unannounced, Aziza is once again standing in her room – internship, Portugal, everything canceled. But her room is occupied. Her mother, Trixi, has rented it out. Zach lives there now, a twenty-something from New Zealand, who came to Germany on a one-way ticket. Starting from this situation, the film develops an almost documentary-style portrait of a Kreuzberg ‘situation’: everything is readily available, time, people, summer, streets. And in the end a crash, the film itself: ‘for nothing’?Read More »

Synopsis
White-tiled rooms, neon lighting; on the walls black and white photographs from an exhibition entitled ,Vernichtungskrieg’ (War of Extermination) documenting the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Against this background, Ruth Beckermann and cameraman Peter Roehsler have filmed former soldiers talking about their experiences beyond the bounds of ,normal’ warfare. With a mixture of helplessness, impotence, shame, opportunism and undiminished fanaticism, witnesses from that time tell of atrocities such as the shootings of Russian prisoners-of-war, the murder of Jews and abuse of women. The differing accounts of these events demonstrate how selective perception was even in this most inhuman and brutal of environments.Read More »

Synopsis:
Susanne Wallner returns to the ruins of Berlin from a Concentration Camp after WW2 to discover that someone else lives in her apartment: Dr. Hans Mertens, the war made him depressive and he drinks a lot of alcohol. Susanne asks him to go but he doesn’t want to, so they share Susanne’s apartment and even discover their sympathy and then their love for each other. That encourages him a little, of course. But then he hears that Ferdinand Brückner is still alive and also lives in Berlin. Brückner was his Captain during WW2, he gave the order to kill more than 100 innocent people, many children and women among them, on Christmas 1942 in Poland.Read More »

A woman screams, a newborn baby cries. A nurse leaves the hospital and dumps a bucketfull of slimy afterbirth into a bin.Moments later, Kubelkind (“Dumpster-kid”, an Austrian insult) emerges fully grown from the slime. “Frau Dr. Welfare”, a cold, upper middle-class do-gooder discovers Kubelkind in the dustbin and plans to “save” her. But such “polymorphous-perverse, infantile monsters” have no place in normal society….Read More »

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM:
Quote:

“Far from being a puzzle film (like Citizen Kane or Muriel), Not Reconciled is better described as a ‘lacunary film’, in the same sense that Littré defines a lacunary body: a whole composed of agglomerated crystals with intervals among them, like the interstitial spaces between the cells of an organism”. Jean-Marie Straub’s description of his second film and second Heinrich Böll adaptation (after Machorka-Muff) helps to explain why, although it has more plot than any of his other works — containing even more characters and intrigues than Othon — it is virtually impossible to paraphrase in the form of a synopsis. Read More »