26 year-old Karl Marx embarks with his wife, Jenny, on the road to exile. In 1844 in Paris, he meets Friedrich Engels, an industrialist’s son, who has been investigating the sordid birth of the British working class. Engels, the dandy, provides the last piece of the puzzle to the young Karl...
GDR, August 1989: Hanna and Andreas became a target of the secret police and had to give up their plans for their future studies and desired professions. Instead, they face arbitrariness, mistrust and reprisals. Their only chance for a self-determined life lies in fleeing across the Baltic Sea....
Taking place at the Concentration camp Buchenwald at the end of March 1945, prisoner Hans Pippig discovers in a carrying case of an incoming prisoner a Jewish child. If reported the three-year-old is sure to die. On the other hand, a violation of the rules of the camp would threaten the long...
Jenny is young. Her life is over. She killed someone. And she would do it again. When an 80-year-old piano teacher discovers the girl’s secret, her brutality and her dreams, she decides to transform her pupil into the musical wunderkind she once was.
Weimar, 1921. The life of 20-year-old Lotte Brendel seems to be predetermined. Her father sees her as a future wife and mother on the side of a man who is to take over the parental carpentry business. But the idiosyncratic Lotte joins a group of young artists against the will of her family, applies...
Peter Weiss’ monumental 1965 stage play, among the greatest artworks on the Holocaust, condenses the testimonies of witnesses and the accused during the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963-1965. This ultra-faithful film adaptation builds, across four hours, in its intensity and graphically...
In October 1989, the part of the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg called SO 36, had been largely shut off by the Wall from the rest of the city for 28 years. A lethargic sub-culture of students, artists, bohemians and barflys had flourished among crumbling buildings. Part of that microcosm is...
At the beginning of 2000, the young commissioner Yvonne Weber moved from Frankfurt am Main to Eisenach. Together with the local colleague Frank Wolf, she is to review an unresolved murder case from the GDR era. The investigation team encounters inconsistencies in the file and it becomes clear that...
A well-placed site manager and father slips into a midlife crisis and recalls promptly to a former lover. Satirical comedy that finds compelling cinematic narrative technique for the feeling of comprehensive alienation and emotional state of emergency worded precisely in images that make over room...
East Germany, 1988. 19-year-old Franka doesn't really care for politics. She prefers going to the disco and dreaming about seeing Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson live in concert. But beneath her carefree façade, she is scarred by the loss of her baby brother. But then she meets Stefan: He's...
1831. A village schoolteacher Matthias Spitzbart dreams of the ideal school and writes a textbook on the perfect educational institution. When he becomes principal of a grammar school by chance, he puts his ideas into practice. His almost missionary-like zeal blossoms in wondrous ways, but his...
The film intertwines historical events and intimate memories. I observe how architecture represents the transformations of society and those who give form to this architecture. We follow the journey of Munio, my father, born in 1909 in Silesia, Poland, the son of a tenant farmer of a Prussian...
Once upon a time very much alike the twenties in Germany, a little town is frightened to death by an uncaught child murderer. Since somebody has to be blamed the townspeople turn against an inconspicious policeman, a family-man who becomes suspected of the crime and therefore loses his job....
