German

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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

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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 »

New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine, a young factory worker, produces the unrest wheel, swinging in the heart of the mechanical watch. Exposed to new ways of organizing money, time and labour, she gets involved with the local movement of the anarchist watchmakers, where she meets Russian traveller Pyotr Kropotkin.Read More »

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In the last decades of the 19th century, Karl May (1842-1912) was the most successful author in Germany. For 30 years he turned out 40 pages a day, constructing a staggering body of kitsch adventure-fiction that may originally have owed a certain debt to James Fenimore Cooper but that, finally, created a mythology quintessentially German.
In his most popular stories, written in the first person, May recalled his adventures in the American West with his idealized white blood-brother, Old Shatterhand, and the equally idealized Indian warrior, Winnetou. Seeking a change of locale, May also wrote similar first-person tales about adventures in the Near and Far East.Read More »

Nursing homes in Holland have a long waiting list. It has become customary to register as early as possible to ensure future placement.
Impressive is Rob Houwer’s film which casts its eye on an old peoples’ home. Filmed in colour, it contains the haunting image: an eerie, disquieting shot of numerous residents all peering out of their windows simultaneously, all silent, all looking heartbreakingly lonely. Were this a horror film it would be terrifying, as it is it strikes a more melancholy chord.Read More »

This documentary explores the life and work of the Austrian novelist, playwright and political activist, Peter Handke. The director managed to meet and stay with Handke in his house in the country side near Paris. Director Corinna Belz also did a portrait on the artist Gerhard Richter.Read More »

Gertie, called Flo by her friends, sees her big chance of a model carreer, when she manages to get the business card of successful model Chantal at a fashion show in her sleepy village. She goes to Berlin and nests in the flat share of Chantal and Freddie. Whereas country girl Flo is still busy to find herself, Chantal is about to lose herself more and more in the depths of stardom. The story of a very unusual female friendship.Read More »

A collision with a sheep on a country road initiates a whole series of weird and unsettling experiences for Anna and Nick which ultimately leave them both incapable of being certain exactly where they are: in the real world, in their own imaginations – or in someone else’s imagination.

1 win, 8 nominations.Read More »