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Description
Noted by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as one of his top ten favorite films of all time, this masterpiece from Oscar-nominated director Werner Herzog is an unforgettable portrait of madness and power. In the mid-16th century, after annihilating the Incan empire, Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) leads his army of conquistadors over the Andes into the heart of the most savage environment on earth in search of the fabled City of Gold, El Dorado....
Description
The most comprehensive documentation of events surrounding the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, the centerpiece of the citizens' movement that led to the fall of the Wall. The film includes interviews with demonstrators, members of the citizens' rights movement, officials and bystanders in East Germany's peaceful revolution. This DVD also features a poetic 1991 documentary on the after effects of German unification, Eastern landscape, by Eduard...
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An African immigrant struggles to make a new life for himself in the big city in director-co-writer Burhan Qurbani's (We Are Young. We Are Strong) audacious, neon-lit reinterpretation of Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel. After surviving his perilous journey, Francis vows to be a good man, but he soon realizes how difficult it is to be righteous while undocumented in Germany – without papers, without a nationality, and without a work permit. When he receives...
Description
A socialist story of "atoms for peace" and compulsory labor in an East German uranium mine under Soviet control. Banned at Soviet insistence, it impresses even today with its political complexity, variety of characters and realistic portrayal of daily work in a forbidden zone of the industrial landscape. Sun seekers was banned in 1958 at the urging of the USSR, in part because it is about Soviet-German relations and the mining of uranium to support...
Description
Two roommates in a private sanatorium in early-1950s East Germany are extremely different from one another. Josef is a communist policeman, while Hubertus is a Lutheran vicar. While Josef reads The Communist manifesto, Hubertus prepares his sermon. Above their beds hang Stalin and Christ. The film offers both suspense and comedy, as the two begrudgingly develop tolerance and respect for one another. Orginally East German officials had not been open...
Description
At once an invaluable photographic record of life in Weimer Berlin and a timeless demonstration of the cinema's ability to enthrall on a purely visceral level, Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt) offers a kaleidoscopic view of a single day in the life of a bustling metropolis. Carl Mayer (The Last Laugh), influenced by the naturalistic Kammerspiel movement, envisioned "a melody of pictures" sprung from daily reality...
Description
Filmed as the GDR crumbled, this somber, finely drawn portrait of life in East Berlin depicts a young architect whose life and goals are strangled by communist dogma represented by the older generation. One of the first fiction films to deal with both the GDR and unification period. Daniel feels like a stranger in his own land. His architectural plans for a new development have been rejected for not complying with standardized designs. His colleagues...
Description
Susanne is a young, single mother who lives a somewhat alternative, unstructured lifestyle. After quitting her job, she finds herself in trouble financially and attempts a minor insurance fraud to make ends meet. Despite its rare view of everyday socialism from a woman's perspective, East German officials were critical of this frank portrayal of a less-than-ideal socialist citizen and turned down all invitations for the film to be screened abroad....
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Description
For 18 months Pacho Velez and Courtney Stephens traveled the US to document sections of the wall that are on display in over 75 locations, ranging from the serious (Fort Benning) to the bizarre (Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas) and even the campus of nearby Capital University. Along the way, interviews with unusual characters who own, maintain, and interact with pieces of the wall offer a window into American culture, and through the film...
Description
By the time the DEFA Studio for Animation Film closed in 1992, it had produced more than 800 shorts in a wide variety of styles and techniques. The 16 animation films included in this collection were directed by 8 different animators between 1974 and 1990, and give a taste of animation production in East Germany. Established in 1955, the studio initially produced shorts exclusively for children. During the 1970s and '80s, however, films targeting...
Description
In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Da-Da-R is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany -- the DDR. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their...
Description
This historical satire, based on Heinrich Mann's world-famous novel, Der Untertan, is ranked by film critics among the 100 Most Significant German Films of all time. In Mann's biting critique of conservative Wilhelmine Germany, written during WWI, Diederich Hessling learns an important lesson for an ambitious man: one must first serve power to gain power for oneself. From then on, his modus operandi is to bow to superiors and kick underlings.
Description
Hamburg, Germany 1934: An executioner is needed. Teetjen (Erwin Geschonneck) makes the biggest mistake of his life. Because his butcher shop is facing bankruptcy, he agrees to execute a group of political prisoners for the Nazis. Once this becomes known, Teetjen's life falls apart. The Axe of Wandsbek was the only DEFA film made by Falk Harnack, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter who was interested in exploring the involvement of the middle class...
Description
In the summer of 1945, Dresden factory workers send their colleague, Kalle, hundreds of miles north to pick up carbide, which is needed for welding jobs in their factory. His attempts to bring the supplies back through the Soviet occupation zone become a hilarious odyssey full of high jinks and misadventures. A rare classic of German film comedy! Right after WWII, factory worker Karl Bluecher, nicknamed Kalle, sets out from Dresden for Wittenberge...
Description
What do real estate tycoon Donald Trump and the Heinz Tomato Ketchup dynasty have in common? Their ancestors come from Kallstadt, a small, quiet winegrowing village in the German Palatinate region. Can this really be a coincidence? Director Simone Wendel – also from Kallstadt – explores the issue.
16) My little sister
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Lisa (Nina Hoss), once a brilliant playwright, has grown apart from her twin brother Sven since putting aside her writing and moving with her family to Switzerland. Sven was once himself a famous stage actor, and when he is diagnosed with aggressive leukemia in Berlin, Lisa is determined to help. Doing everything in her power to help Sven recover, as well as to bring him back to the stage, she puts aside her own life, even risking her relationship...
Description
Based on the records of the Nuremberg trial of the chemical giant IG Farben; a story about the collaboration between international corporations and Nazi scientists, whose research contributed to the death of millions. Musical score by Hanns Eisler, electronic sound by Oskar Sala (Hitchcock's The Birds) and script by Friedrich Wolf. The chemist Dr. Hans Scholz lives through a tortuous political transformation and maturation process. Eventually, he...
Description
Alfred and Lisa decide to divorce after only a couple of months of marriage. Alfred takes a few days off to clear his head, riding through Berlin and meeting strangers; although he ultimately returns to Lisa, but the ending remains open. In East Germany's closest counterpart to early Godard, Jürgen Böttcher grasps the life of 20-year-olds in Prenzlauer Berg with social and regional exactness and translates it into a universal language. Born in '45...
19) Coming Out
Description
Although he has a girlfriend who is expecting his child, Philipp, a young teacher in Berlin, meets Matthias and falls in love. After years of repressing his homosexuality, he must finally accept himself for who he truly is. The first and only DEFA feature film about homosexuality, Coming Out premiered on November 9, 1989 ... the evening the Berlin Wall came down. Philipp and Tanja teach at the same school. Both enjoy their work immensely, win their...
Description
Lynn is the most meticulous chambermaid in her hotel, leaving no shelf undusted, no sheet untucked. Crippled by shyness, she rummages through guests' belongings and even hides under their beds, vicariously experiencing their conversations, meals and discreet interludes. After clandestinely observing an S&M session, Lynn discovers the phone number of the call girl, Chiara. Bold and unrestrained, Chiara soon draws Lynn out of her shell, opening her...
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