German

A woman juggling care for her elderly parents and a failing marriage encounters a single mom. Their unexpected bond challenges her to face the cracks in her meticulously planned life.Read More »

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Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play Samfundets Stotter (Pillars of Society) was the source for this German drama. The plot centers upon a flagrant case of municipal corruption, carried out by the town’s “finest” people. The selfishness of the elite results in widespread tragedy, yet still the perpetrators hypocritically blame everyone but themselves. The director of Stutzen der Gesellschaft was Detlef Sierck, who as “Douglas Sirk” would later expose the peccadilloes of the rich and powerful in such American films as Written on the Wind. The Ibsen original was earlier adapted to the screen in 1915, with H. B. Walthall in the lead.Read More »

At the end of the nineteenth century, Russia, Prince Nekhlyudov, on the verge of contracting a marriage of convenience, leads a superficial and mundane life. He is appointed juror in the trial of a woman in whom he recognizes Katyusha, a woman he once seduced and abandoned pregnant.Read More »

Considered one of the most significant films of DEFA, the state-run East German film studio, Goya is a monumental 70mm production directed by one of East Germany’s leading directors, Konrad Wolf, who won a Special Jury Prize at the 1971 Moscow International Film Festival for this work which was also nominated for the festival’s Golden Prize. The film is based on a 1951 novel by the German-Jewish exile author Lion Feuchtwanger. Goya is one of ten East German films originally shot in 70mm.Read More »

An early short film by Douglas Sirk (Detlef Sierck) which takes a satirical look at dubious business practices during the Weimar Republic.Read More »

Adaptation of Molière’s comedy “The Imaginary Invalid”, about a hypochondriac, his doctor, his daughter and her lover.Read More »

Two years after their breakup, Hannah and Jimmy fall in love with each other again but their 7-year-old daughter schemes to keep them from reuniting.Read More »

After short time in London, a murder has happened with a bullet in the form of a black widow for the second time, provides the drinkable journalist Welby to investigate. It turns out that the victim had attended a Mexico expedition several years ago, whose director Avery allegedly came through the bite of a black widow killed. After also former expedition members lose their lives, the suspicion of the attractive daughter Avery falls.Read More »

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Joris Ivens’ Rain left a lasting impression on Bergmann-Michel. The main motif of the lyrically edited film is a single rain shower, filmed over a period of two years. As a working portrait with photos, drawings, collages and sequences from the films rediscovered for this purpose, Mein Herz schlägt Blau – Ella Bergmann-Michel combines her artistic biography with her cinematic commitment to social reform. The essay by Jutta Hercher and Maria Hemmleb tells of the grotesque collages influenced by natural science, of pacifist hopes, photographic experiments and the film working group in New Frankfurt. Mein Herz schlägt Blau begins in the Schmelzmühle, the meeting place of artist friends and, during the Nazi era, an ‘underground’ retreat. – Fischfang in der Rhön comes closest to Bergmann-Michel’s free artistic work and combines it with a documentary perspective. The encounter with Ivens’ Regen echoes.Read More »