The young, despotic and untalented artist Adolf Hitler comes to Vienna to study art. He befriends the Jew Schlomo Herzl working on a novel with the title "Mein Kampf". Hitler is rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Herzl's concern for the sad young man continues, and leads him to a new career with disastrous consequences for world history.
Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism.
The Queen of the Night has begged Prince Tamino to free her daughter Pamina from the clutches of the High Priest Sarastro, who has abducted her. Together with the bird-catcher Papageno, Tamino enters Sarastro's realm to seek her. When he finds her, the two fall in love, but they have to have to undergo ordeals before they can be together. At the end, Papageno is also rewarded with his Papagena.
The true story of Wanda Rutkiewicz, the first woman in the world and the first person from Poland to climb the highest peaks on earth, told by herself.
Known as a creator of astonishing images, stage director and visual artist Robert Wilson delivers a magnificent production of Mozart’s adaption of Handel’s Messias. Mozart was commissioned by Gottfried van Swieten to modernise the score fifty years after Handel’s popular composition (1742), mainly by arranging the wind parts and partially re-composing them. With Marc Minkowski a conductor has been engaged who understands perfectly how to combine baroque style with the tonal possibilities of an orchestra of the classical period like the Musiciens du Louvre. The excellent soloist quartet with Elena Tsallagova, Wiebke Lehmkuhl, Richard Croft and José Coca Loza merges perfectly into Wilson’s enormous flood of images.
The village of Tamaquito lies deep in the forests of Colombia. Here, nature provides the people with everything they need. But the Wayúu community's way of life is being destroyed by the vast and rapidly growing El Cerrejón coal mine. Determined to save his community from forced resettlement, the leader Jairo Fuentes negotiates with the mine's operators, which soon becomes a fight to survive.
Young Peer Gynt returns home once again after unsuccessfully looking for work. His mother already goes to meet him and he describes his alleged adventures to her. In his imagination, he sees himself as a king and escapes reality with his stories. His mother would have liked him to marry Ingrid, with whose dowry they would be well provided for, but Ingrid is promised to Mats and will marry him the very next day. While Peer once again escapes into his world of thoughts while lying in the grass, he is laughed at by the others of the village. They warn him to come to Ingrid's wedding feast, where the whole village is celebrating. But he does not care and there he meets Solvejg, whom he likes very much, but she initially turns away from him. So he kidnaps the bride Ingrid, incurring the wrath of the groom and the rest of the village youth.
Woyzeck takes psychotropic drugs and punishes himself physically. He has no choice. It's his living. With what he earns selling his body and by working in a restaurant and in subway tunnels, he just about makes ends meet. Coming home to his wife Marie and his infant child, he’s an impotent wreck -- and definitely unable to afford the earrings he sees Marie wearing one day. She’s frustrated and the jewelry is a gift from the local pimp. Woyzeck wasn't supposed to find out. But he has. Plagued by voices, he loses his already weak grip on reality. He retreats into the tunnels with Marie and the baby. There Woyzeck is the master of life and death.
My mother googles the film hero of her youth: Helmut Berger. She is shocked: only an addicted shadow of the former icon seems to be left. She decides to halt the obvious catastrophic decline of the once “most handsome man in the world”. As a consequence, this one-time god of the screen is suddenly sitting on my mother’s sofa in Nordsehl in Lower Saxony. And he stays put - for several months. While he trustingly rolls out his whole life before us, the dividing lines between film team, world star and family intermingle. This is a film about ageing, rising and falling - and about the fact that it is sometimes possible to regain an element of dignity in life.
HOMO SAPIENS is visionary documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter's exploration of the finiteness and fragility of human existence, the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being. What will remain of our lives after we're gone? Empty spaces, ruins, cities, increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, now abandoned and decaying, gradually reclaimed by nature. Comprised of a succession of eerily depopulated, dystopian landscapes from across the world, HOMO SAPIENS offers an at once mesmerizing and chilling vision of what a posthuman future might look like.
In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.
At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat outside.
In 1988 Cynthia Beatt and the young Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall into little-known territory. The film CYCLING THE FRAME is now an unusual document. 21 years later, in June 2009, Beatt & Swinton re-traced the line of the Wall that once isolated West Berlin. THE INVISIBLE FRAME depicts this poetic passage through varied landscapes, this time on both sides of the former Wall.
Hate, political manipulation, uncontrollable filter bubbles, mental illness: In the eyes of many, our social media world has a corrosive effect on society. What can be done?
A focus on the inner workings of a political party making headlines at district, state and national level as an “alternative for Germany”. Thanks to the film’s striking objectivity, it becomes clear where argument ends and contradictions begin.
"Die Unbeugsamen" ("The Indomitable") is the story of women's struggle against sexual discrimination and for inclusion in the democratic process in (West) Germany after WW II.
Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.
