3sat

Documentary on Lars von Trier

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.

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.

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.

Bianca Charamsa made her way to Japan during this year's cherry blossom season to get to grips with the country's character through conversations with some of its artists. Although two violent atomic catastrophes - the bombing of Hiroshima and the Fukushima nuclear disaster - have shaken and shaped modern-day Japan, the artist Takahiro Iwasaki believes that memory of 6th and 9th August 1945 is slowly fading, despite all the folded cranes left by visitors to the memorial sites. Natural catastrophes like sea- and earthquakes also rock Japan time and time again; perhaps this explains why the Japanese aesthetic Wabi Sabi incorporates both beauty and decay...much like the beauty of the cherry blossom as it withers during the annual festival of Hanami

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.

For twenty years the Wiesenbergers cultivated the same rituals. Practising once a week in the local chappel and singing for weddings and birthdays. Meanwhile, their world turned upside down. Their CD is rising up the charts and they're overwhelmed with concert request - showbusiness is calling. Now, they even were invited to perform in Shanghai. But the tempting offer puts their solidarity to a test.

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.

Nick Lowe is a pivotal figure in UK pub rock, punk rock and new wave, Lowe has recorded a string of well-reviewed solo albums. He is best known for his songs "Cruel to Be Kind" (a US Top 40 single), and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" (a top 10 UK hit), as well as his production work with Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and others. Lowe also wrote "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding", a hit for Costello.

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.

An unparalleled portrait of Arthur Miller (1915-2005), a major writer who left an indelible mark on the world. Miller's life is intimately connected with the great themes that marked the 20th century. Glamour, fame, social criticism and Marilyn Monroe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Documentary about Svetlana Geier, a Ukranian who has translated the great works of Dostoyevsky into German. First her father ends up in one of Stalin's prison camps, then young Svetlana herself experiences the German invasion. In order to survive she learns German at home in Kiev. She is good and gets work as a translator before ending up in a German camp in 1943. Now, 65 years later, she is a renowned translator who in her twilight years has translated the great works of Dostoevsky. For the first time in all these years, she returns to Kiev together with her granddaughter.

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.

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.