Germany

  • Joe May – Das Indische Grabmal: Der Tiger von Eschnapur AKA Mysteries of India, Part II: Above All Law (1921)

    1921-1930AdventureGermanyJoe MaySilentWeimar Republic cinema

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    The jealous & vindictive Rajah of Bengal continues to manipulate the fates of his three English captives in his mad scheme to punish his faithless wife.

    THE Indian TOMB: THE TIGER OF BENGAL is a perfect example of the grand German cinema epics created during the silent era. Berlin film mogul Joe May turned the full resources of his modern 50-acre Maytown studio near Berlin over to the production, using 300 workmen to create the lavish sets necessary to tell such an exotic tale.Read More »

  • Donatello Dubini – Die Reise Nach Kafiristan AKA The Journey to Kafiristan (2001)

    2001-2010AdventureArthouseDonatello DubiniGermanyQueer Cinema(s)

    In 1939, the author Annemarie Schwarzenbach and ethnologist Ella Maillart travel together by car to Kabul, but each is in pursuit of her own project. Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who was among Erika and Klaus Mann’s circle of friends in the 30’s, is searching for a place of refuge in the Near East to discover her own self. Ella Maillart justifies her restlessness, her need for movement and travel, with a scientific pretext: she would like to explore the mysterious Kafiristan Valley and “make a name” for herself with publications on the archaic life of the nomads living there. Both women are on the run, but political developments and their own biographies catch up with them again and again. Their mutual journey through the outside world, which runs from Geneva via the Balkans and Turkey to Persia, is compounded by the inner world of emotions with a tender love story. As both women arrive in Kabul, the Second World War breaks out and puts an end to their plans.Read More »

  • Sohrab Shahid Saless – Der Weidenbaum AKA The Willow Tree (1984)

    1981-1990DramaGermanySohrab Shahid Saless

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    Synopsis

    One of Sohrab Shahid Saless final TV-productions made in Germany/Czechoslovakia and based on various short stories by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov.Read More »

  • Peter Nestler – Ödenwaldstetten (1964)

    1961-1970DocumentaryGermanyPeter NestlerShort Film

    Portrait of a small south German village and its residents in the early sixties.
    Rural culture is undergoing a transformation caused by the intrusion of the industrial world. Gestures at work and words of its inhabitants.Read More »

  • Isabelle Stever – Glückliche Fügung (2010)

    Drama2001-2010GermanyIsabelle Stever


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    37-year-old Simone decides to go out alone on New Year’s Eve. The next morning, she wakes up next to a stranger in his car, and a few weeks later she discovers that she’s pregnant. By coincidence, she runs into the stranger again – the handsome Hannes – and is surprised to find that contrary to her expectations, he’s actually happy about the pregnancy and wants to live with her. Could this be the face of happiness? While Hannes works in a hospital as a nurse in palliative care, tending to the dying with extraordinary tenderness, Simone renovates their shared, little home. An attractive neighbor fuels Simone’s jealousy. The larger Simone’s belly grows, the more extensively Hannes’ integrity warms the nest, the more oppressive their little, homemade prison appears.Read More »

  • Paul Schrader – Adam Resurrected (2008)

    2001-2010DramaGermanyPaul SchraderWar

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    Quote:
    While the Holocaust is certainly a legitimate topic of inquiry for the committed filmmaker, most contemporary treatments of the Nazi camps betray their mission by allowing the viewer to feel altogether too comfortable as they take in the on-screen atrocities. Whether through the establishment of a mitigating historical distance, the adoption of standard genre tropes or the repetition of an established catalog of horrors, films like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and A Secret tend to overly familiarize the events of World War II, allowing the viewer to safely assimilate that conflict’s genocidal horrors. But whatever the flaws of Adam Resurrected, and despite the fact that no physical violence is perpetrated on screen, Paul Schrader never allows the viewer to get comfortably situated, relying on an absurdist central conceit and a rapidly shifting array of intellectual and moral concerns—whose superficial treatment unfortunately leads to a certain diffuseness in the work—to continually de-familiarize his subject.Read More »

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