German

A fascinating doco with loads of file footage of the Nazi conception of the cinematic arts.Read More »

This is the fairy tale of someone who went out in search of a rabbit and discovered the world along the way. So a children’s fairy tale? A fairy tale for adults about a child. Or about the happiness that a child can still conquer while we have blocked our way there. That we might still be able to conquer if we regain the belief that it is not lost forever. A film about paradise rediscovered? No, from the hope that paradise was never entirely lost. The film begins with eight-year-old Marcel waking up after his father has run away and his mother is spending the night with her boyfriend. The boy makes his own breakfast and feeds the rabbit that is camping in the old cot. A child left alone in a world they trust.Read More »

A minor character from a collection of marionettes takes viewers through a small world theatre where they come across various types, including the seducer, the demagogue and the obedient masses.
Ambitious puppet animation with a didactic and political purpose against propaganda methods.Read More »

Wanting to start a new life, 40-year-old Heli has found an institution in which she can put her younger, mentally disabled sister. Her three egocentric brothers have agreed to the plan and come to share their sister’s final weekend at the house where they all grew up on the outskirts of Berlin.Read More »

Schaub and Schindelm’s documentary follows two Swiss star architects on two very different projects: the national stadium for the Olympic summer games in Peking 2008 and a city area in the provincial town of Jinhua, China. Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are literally building bridges between two cultures, two architectural traditions, and two political systems. Their work doesn’t simply enhance China’s great international debut, but serves the everyday needs of the Chinese population. “Bird’s Nest” presents the Basle architects as they find solutions not in the comfort of an ivory tower but in encounters and friction on the ground.Read More »

Biologie! was one of very few East German feature films to address environmental issues.

In a small East German town shortly before the fall of the Wall, Ulla, a sensitive and principled 10th-grader, meets computer-obsessed Winfried, son of a chemical plant manager. On a field trip with her biology class, Ulla discovers that a trout farm and weekend homes are being built illegally in a local conservation area. The situation gets complicated when she discovers that Winfried’s family is responsible.
Ulla nevertheless passionately agitates to stop the construction project, even soliciting Winfried to help her create a touched-up photograph of a rare bird as “evidence” that the conservation area is home to an endangered species. When Ulla’s deception is discovered, she faces serious consequences.Read More »

Quote:
There is not much that Ruth Beckermann brings to her film: An empty former coffin factory, a few lights and reflectors, a camera, a piano and a huge rose-gold canapé in the style of the Belle Epoque, as well as the wickedly titled book – and, of course, above all, men. Lots and lots of men. Old, young, middle-aged. Bourgeois and civil servant types, pensioners and washed-up people of indeterminate age, students and “young professionals”, people who have lost their way and smart up-and-comers. In between, the former director of the Austrian Film Museum, an ex-bodybuilder or martial artist, a linnet and various other specimens of the male species.Read More »

Shot on location in West Beriln, Nordstrand and Heiligensee, Sept/Oct 1986 and March 1987

Quote:
Cult movie ‘Nihil oder Alle Zeit der Welt’ from 1987, featuring the members of Einstürzende Neubauten as actors. It’s a film about a group of young ‘Terrorists’ (Neubauten), fighting desperately against an obscure ‘professor’, that represent a personification of all things bad and ugly in today’s civilization.
-tarantullashop.comRead More »

Plot:
A would-be novelist with no ideas of his own mines the tragedies of an unsuspecting woman to his advantage in this drama. Robert (Ulrich Matthes) is a college professor and struggling writer living in Konstanz, a town in Southern Germany. Robert has been working on a novel for years, but beyond a rough idea about life in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down, he has no worthwhile ideas and doesn’t have much to show for his efforts; as Robert edges into his mid-forties, he’s begun to worry his literary career will never get off the ground. Robert happens to meet a young woman named Inga (Anna Maria Muehe) who was raised by her grandparents after her mother died soon after she was born; Robert senses there’s something in her story that would make for a good novel, and he begins drawing her out, trying to find out more about her and her childhood that he can use as source material for his book. As Robert digs deeper, it becomes clear he’s learned a few things about Inga’s past that she doesn’t know — and not everything she’s been told about her mother is the truth. Novemberkind (aka November Child) was the first feature film from writer and director Christian Schwochow.Read More »