German

Synopsis:
This poetic documentary shows people and situations from both East and West Berlin. As if invisible, the camera crosses over the wall several times, fusing the experiences into something that didn’t exist in the mid-eighties-outside of the cinema. 25 years after the Berlin Wall was built, perhaps the most horrifying aspect was that the Berliners took it for granted and had learned to ignore it. The wall was mirrored in everyone’s head. This film questions that ingrown attitude.—FilmportalRead More »

Quote:
Signer’s “action sculptures” involve setting up, carrying out, and recording “experiments” or events that bear aesthetic results. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event. Signer gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evidence of scientific logic as an artistic challenge.Read More »

Synopsis:
Film adaptation of the short Büchner story of the same name, which tells of the stay of the psychotic Sturm und Drang poet Lenz in the home of the Alsatian priest and philanthropist Oberlin. The poet, whose pathological hallucinations are becoming increasingly unbearable, hopes for help from the gentle clergyman. But Oberlin, too, knows no advice; he regards his friend’s illness as God-given.Read More »

First her father ends up in one of Stalin’s prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and gets work as a translator before ending up in a German camp in 1943. Now, 65 years later, she is a renowned translator who in her twilight years has translated the great works of Dostoevsky. For the first time in all these years, she returns to Kiev together with her granddaughter.
—Göteborg International Film FestivalRead More »

Due to a delayed flight a group of German flight passengers have to wait in the hall of the airport of Manila. The crowd is quite mixed, ranging from an cultivated east German teacher couple up to sleazy sex tourists. As the waiting prolongs, more and more aggressions and long repressed behaviors shed their way to the surface.Read More »

Day Is Done becomes, among other things, a poetic but also wryly humorous study of the
selfish artist trying to play the indifferent God, but ending up revealing himself as all too
human. (…) Day Is Done contains images of ravishing though unconventional urban beauty.
(Screen Daily, 14.02.11)Read More »

It narrates the life of Czech writer Franz Kafka, from his birth to his death.Read More »

“For heaven’s sake, what a question!” exclaims the mother as her son begins the conversation; they had avoided one another for decades.
The film traces a reencounter between the director and his aged parents. It is an attempt at a personal revision of the past. In the process, a new view of his parents emerges, which also provides again and again insight into a bygone era. The story of their marriage, however, borders on a classic drama, leaving us feeling forlorn and miserable even today.Read More »

In the port town of Hamburg, Germany, Floyd decides that he’s shipping out to South Africa and Singapore now that his two-year probation for an unspecified juvenile offense has been completed. When he shares the news with his devoted friends Chubby, a mechanic, and Ricco, a fast-food cook and would-be b-boy, they can’t comprehend their thoughtful friend’s willingness to trade camaraderie for a wider view of the world. Overcoming their anger and bewilderment, the guys decide to spend one last night with Floyd, but the problem, as always, is how to find some fun. A succession of fast-food restaurants, parking garages, and local watering holes chronicles the inherent boredom of life in the provinces. But a run-in with a convention of dragster-racing Elvis impersonators sends the boys and their friend Telsa Julia Hummer on a series of adventures that veers from the farcical to the almost-tragic.Read More »