Germany

  • Nikias Chryssos – Der Bunker (2015)

    2011-2020ComedyDramaGermanyNikias Chryssos

    A young student seeks quiet and solitude to focus on an important work but ends up as the teacher of a peculiar boy who is home-schooled by his parents in an isolated bunker mansion. THE BUNKER is a dark, twisted, and funny tale about childhood, growing up and education.Read More »

  • Ingo Petzke – Northern Lights (2015) (DVD)

    2011-2020ExperimentalGermanyIngo Petzke

    If we really strive for emancipation from visual maiming in the cinema, away from institutionalised viewing-schemata on TV, it is not sufficient to keep expanding the boundaries and to start breaking new visual grounds. In addition to the small avant-garde of filmmakers doing so, we need an army of others starting to sow and cultivate the ploughed-up grounds and who will bring in the harvest for the benefit of those still visually undernourished. Werner Nekes, the doyen of German Experimental Film once claimed that the first trains were more important than golden stage coaches. Well, alright then, let’s use these newly-developed means of visual trans-portation to advance into the new grounds into which the tracks have been laid down for years by the Avant-garde.Read More »

  • Werner Nekes – Lagado (1977)

    1971-1980ExperimentalGermanyWerner Nekes

    Quote:
    “…What sounds rather bookish and intimidating, in fact unfolds an enormous sensual stimulus on screen. In more than 20 sequences, based in part on work by Stifter and Camus, Hamburg’s experimental film director and a number of students from Braunschweig and Göttingen demonstrate a higher school of hearing and seeing. With manipulations of sight and sound, which are at times highly complex and mathematically precise, he shows the tension between optical and acoustic elements, inventing ever new combinations from which an abstract poetry issues forth. Nekes works with single frame mechanism and multiple copying of the images, thus defamiliarizing the sound at the same time. The title of the film pertains to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. Lagado is the name of the academy in which scientists of the most diverse disciplines work at strange projects.” – Hans C. BlumenbergRead More »

  • Werner Nekes – Diwan (1974)

    1971-1980ExperimentalGermanyWerner Nekes

    Quote:
    “Diwan, a lyric anthology, an outdoor movie with people. With people living in the surrounding precious and very beautifully photographed nature, are neither more nor less than one part of it. What Nekes manages there with landscape, as a cunning and quote many fine artist in a medium that runs in time, as he defeated the time changed, by themselves for change of scenery uses, as it interferes with the laws of chronology through the rewind ability of the camera or destroyed, which is a compelling and highly aesthetic experimental company.”Read More »

  • Fatih Akin – Gegen die Wand AKA Head-On (2004)

    2001-2010DramaFatih AkinGermanyRomance

    Synopsis wrote:
    In ‘Gegen die Wand’ Cahit, a 40-something male from Mersin in Turkey has removed everything Turkish from his life. He has become an alcoholic drug addict and at the start of the movie wants to end it all. Sibel a 20-something female from Hamburg wishes to please her Turkish parents yet yearns for freedom. She has had her nose broken by her brother for being seen holding hands with a boy and yet she can not break her mother’s heart and run away. She too attempts suicide and she first approaches Cahit there at the Hospital. Sibel asks Cahit to marry her, as she believes this to be the way out of her parent’s house. She promises Cahit that their relationship will be like roommates, not like a married couple. The film follows Sibel and Cahit as they get married, become closer and eventually fall in love.Read More »

  • Konrad Wolf – Lissy (1957)

    1951-1960DramaGermanyKonrad Wolf

    Quote:
    A story about the rise of Nazism based on a novel by a German-Jewish author who managed to survive by fleeing to the USA. The movie focuses on working class Berliner Lissy Schroeder who marries clerk Alfred Frohmeyer believing he can provide her with a better life. In 1932, however, his Jewish boss fires him. So Alfred turns to the Nazis, quickly rising in the SA, and acquiring wealth along the way. Lissy, however, discovers there is, as always, a price. The Nazis shoot her brother, a former Communist. And her parents and friends shun her. What is she to do?Read More »

  • Konrad Wolf – Der geteilte Himmel AKA The Divided Heaven (1964)

    1961-1970ArthouseDramaGermanyKonrad Wolf

    While recovering from a mental breakdown, the young Rita Seidel recalls the last two years, in which she fell in love with Manfred, a chemist who is ten years older. As Manfred became disillusioned with his opportunities in East Germany, he moved to the West. Rita followed him there and tried to persuade him to return but soon realized he would never do it. Rita comes to terms with the past and decides to concentrate on her work and the building of a socialist society. Although some of the characters are shown as overzealous in their support of the regime, for obvious reasons the nature of the East German dictatorship is never depicted or discussed. The Stasi, the all-pervasive secret police headed by the director’s brother Markus Wolf, is not mentioned. The film is set in the period immediately before the erection of the Berlin Wall.Read More »

  • Julian Radlmaier – Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa AKA A Spectre Is Haunting Europe (2013)

    2011-2020ComedyGermanyJulian Radlmaier

    Quote:
    Berlin, a summer in the age of neoliberalism: the spectre of the soviet avant-garde is haunting the city. A young Georgian contract-worker is surprised to find the ghost of the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in his kitchen. At the same time, his friend Kasimir inherits a big fortune, but what shall he do with all this money? Framed by a travel through time leading to Flaubert’s 19th Century und the shooting of a revisionist melodrama for German television, the film follows the adventures of these three characters in contemporary Berlin. A suprematist digital comedy about the transmission of emancipatory energies.Read More »

  • Konrad Wolf – Sonnensucher AKA Sun Seekers (1958)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaGermanyKonrad Wolf

    Director Konrad Wolf’s gritty and controversial tale follows two young women who go to work at a uranium mine in Wismut, East Germany. With anarchists, former S.S. soldiers, and ex-Russian officers working in close proximity, the mine becomes a microcosm of world politics and social unrest.Read More »

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