Germany

A white line across the colourful side of the Wall in West Berlin. An art action that was to end with a serious arrest in 1986. The back story takes place in the Weimar punk scene of the 1980s, where small anarchic free spaces were defended against state normalism: Turn the state into cucumber salad! More than thirty years later, it becomes clear that there was a leak. A betrayal is suddenly in the air. The consequences continue to draw their perfidious line to this day. Friendships break up in retrospect. The film tells of the tension between subculture and dictatorship. There is no line to be drawn under the GDR.Read More »

Synopsis:
‘Magdalena and Michael have loved each other since they were children. But when the Nazis come to power, Michael rebels against the regime and is sentenced to fifteen years in a concentration camp. Magdalena, meanwhile, goes underground with the help of a friend and later immigrates to the Soviet Union. Michael, who has joined the Red Army, discovers on the way to Moscow that Magdalena is staying there…’
– DEFA Film LibraryRead More »

A smooth-talking rogue assumes the identity of the new village doctor, and soon has a thriving practice with the help of three quick-witted “daughters”.Read More »

Synopsis:
Jan Nebel’s life is quite depressing and just a streak of bad luck. His former girlfriend tells him that she is HIV positive, his sister is married to a disgusting idiot and his father dies with his head on a plate of noodles. Above all, he gets into a street riot between anarchists and the police on the way to his job at a slaughterhouse. Thus, he is fired, but gets to know the mysterious Vera who becomes his new girlfriend. Together with Jan’s weird friend Buddy, they move into his father’s apartment and try to survive their Berlin everyday life…Read More »

Franz Woyzeck, the protagonist of Georg Büchner’s unfinished drama is incorporated in this adaption of a classic. The contemporary Franz Wodzeck lives in Germany’s Ruhr industrial region. Wodzeck meanders back and forth between the monotony of working each day in a car factory and returning each evening to the cheerless desolation of the factory dormitory. Once his girlfriend, Maleen, snubs him for his boss, Wodzeck’s personal and social frustrations escalate into a vista of emotions: he runs amok and bloodily stubs Maleen to death. After he has killed his one sole love Wodzeck resigns himself to his fate. A hollow shell of a man is admitted to a psychiatric asylum. He feels no more anxiety, no more desire. He simply exists. FBW Prädikat: “wertvoll”.—Oliver HerbrichRead More »

‘A well-off couple adopt a 16-year-old boy from an orphanage in West Berlin, but their attempts to help him assimilate into his new surroundings fail. The repressive tolerance of the well-educated adoptive parents is just too much for the mischievous young boy…’
– MUBIRead More »

The Alchemy performance is a film and sound projection with the duration of approximate 45 minutes. The source material of this work decomposes itself during the show. Each Alchemy is thus an unique event. The work unfolds from a prepared film loop of 10 meter length. It is treated with chemicals during its projection. In the beginning there are hardly recognizable forms fading in from black. Read More »

Synopsis:
What is the perfect body – and how do you get it? People were already grappling with these questions 100 years ago. Wilhelm Prager’s and Nicholas Kaufmann’s documentary “Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit” (Ways to Strength and Beauty), filmed in 1925 for the UFA cultural department, first criticises modern society, which weakens and deforms the human body through industrial work and office activities. According to the motto “A healthy mind lives in a healthy body”, the didactically prepared educational film aims in six chapters at a re-appropriation of a physical ideal state according to the model of antiquity and propagates above all physical training for this purpose.Read More »

Synopsis: Daniel and Clara are on a vacation in Italy. In the form of the mysterious “Sandman” Coppola, a figure from Daniel’s childhood, returns to haunt him, while he succumbs to an obsessive love with an enigmatic woman of strange beauty: Olympia, who might be far more than she first appears to be…Read More »