German

  • Maria Schrader – Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe AKA Vor der Morgenröte (2016)

    Maria Schrader2011-2020DramaGermany

    German actress Maria Schrader subsequently became well-known as the director of the prize-winning 2020 Netflix miniseries Unorthodox. But in this 2016 feature film her considerable directing talents are already on clear display as she portrays Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s years of exile after 1936, moving between Buenos Aires, New York, and Brazil in search of a new home.

    Zweig, whose writings inspired the film The Grand Budapest Hotel, was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals in Europe between the wars. Schrader shows him struggling with life as a nomad and with his separation from the homeland whose language had always nourished him. Though in despair at the collapse of European civilisation, Zweig hesitates to publicly denounce the Nazi regime…Read More »

  • Dito Tsintsadze – Lost Killers (2000)

    Dito Tsintsadze1991-2000ComedyDramaGermany

    Quote:
    Noted Georgian filmmaker Dito Tsintsadze directs this darkly-humorous urban drama about the desperate lives of illegal immigrants in Mannheim, Germany. Lan (Nicole Seelig) is a Vietnamese prostitute whose rotting teeth and odd affliction, which causes her to turn comatose after an orgasm, is impeding her marketability. She soon finds herself in an unlikely romance with Haitian Carlos (Elie James Blezes), who schemes to sell his kidney for enough money to immigrate to Australia. Meanwhile, tyro hitmen Branko (Misel Maticevic) and Merab (Lasha Bakradze) dilly-dally with their assignment to kill a businessman. Merab bores his Croatian counterpart by regaling him with stories about his native Georgia — in between vomiting out of anxiety.Read More »

  • Erich Waschneck – Die Rothschilds AKA The Rothschilds (1940)

    1931-1940DramaErich WaschneckGermanyPoliticsThird Reich Cinema

    Synopsis:
    Anti-semitic Nazi propaganda “biography” of the Rothschilds, a German Jewish family whose members rose to the top of the European banking community during the Napoleonic era.Read More »

  • Hans-Jürgen Syberberg – Penthesilea (1988)

    1981-1990DramaGermanyHans-Jürgen SyberbergTV

    monologue
    Kleist’s Penthesilea is certainly one of the most extraordinary plays in the German of the German dramatic repertoire. It is about the the wild and destructive passion that seizes the Queen of the Amazons and Achilles, the Achilles, the Greek hero, under the walls of Troy. Revulsed by its violence and strangeness -only in the 20th century did people realise the extent of this work – Goethe was and condemned it. Edith Clever brings out the full power of this of this feverish text.Read More »

  • Richard Oswald – Dreyfus AKA The Dreyfus Case (1930)

    1921-1930DramaGermanyRichard OswaldWeimar Republic cinema

    Quote:
    History of the legal scandal involving the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus who was convicted of treason and sent to the penal colony at Devil’s Island in 1894 because of an anti-Semitic conspiracy in the war ministry. Supported by the writer Emile Zola Dreyfus’s wife Lucie fights for his release. In 1899, the verdict against Dreyfus was repealed and shortly after, Dreyfus was pardoned. But it took another six years until Dreyfus was fully exonerated. (filmportal.de)Read More »

  • Wim Wenders – 3 amerikanische LP’s AKA 3 American LPs (1969)

    1961-1970DocumentaryGermanyShort FilmWim Wenders

    Quote:
    3 AMERICAN LP’S was the first film I did with Peter Handke. It was a film about American music, about three pieces of three LP’s. There was a song by Van Morrison, another by Harvey Mandel, and one of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

    It was mainly the music and some shots out of a car, landscapes out of the car window. And it had a little bit of commentary – dialogue between Peter and me about American music and about how American rock music was about emotion and images instead of sounds. That is to say, about a kind of phenomenon, that it was in a way a kind of film music, but without a moving picture.Read More »

  • Karl-Heinz Carpentier, Ulrich Thein, Frank Vogel, Gerhard Klein – Geschichten jener Nacht AKA Stories of That Night (1967)

    1961-1970DramaFrank VogelGerhard KleinGermanyKarl-Heinz CarpentierUlrich Thein

    Synopsis:
    ‘Four directors – four styles – four episodes, all relating the events of a single night which has entered the history books: August 12-13, 1961. There are thousands of complex narratives connected with the frontier drawn through the middle of Berlin and each episode relates the story of a difficult decision made on that night.Read More »

  • Romeo Castellucci – Moses und Aron (2015)

    2011-2020FrancePerformanceRomeo Castellucci

    A profound, powerful and yet unfinished opera, Moses und Aron ends with an admission of defeat: “”O word, thou Word that I lack!””, Moses’ last cry, is also the last phrase the composer has been able to set to music. Recounting the story of Moses, who has experienced the immensity of God, and of Aron, who tries to speak of it; casting doubt, with dodecaphonism, upon the adequacy of tonal and traditional musical language; Moses und Aron questions the possibility of a True Speech. Following in their wanderings the children of Israel, a stateless people lost in the desert and looking for signs and images, Moses un Aron symbolizes the challenges encountered by a community looking for her own identity, torn between spiritual ideal and material needs. Read More »

  • Wenzel Storch – Der Glanz dieser Tage AKA The Glamour of These Days (1989)

    1981-1990ComedyCultGermanyWenzel Storch

    Synopsis: An old man becomes a priest, against the will of his wive, is miraculously made younger by some decades and has diverse bizarre adventures.Read More »

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