Set in the future on a war-ravaged Earth, four exhausted soldiers man Sentinel - a remote military base in a vast ocean that separates two warring continents. While their tour of duty ended three months ago, the relief crew still hasn't arrived and as the empty weeks turn to months, paranoia descends, testing relationships to breaking point...
Fleeing from the Russian secret police, a young Estonian fencer is forced to return to his homeland, where he becomes a physical education teacher at a local school. The past however catches up and puts him in front of a difficult choice.
In this film essay, critic Peter Buchka explores the German cinema of the 1920s, ranging from the disquieting images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the castrating sexuality of Marlene Dietrich in Die Blaue Engel. The program provides an introduction to Weimar cinema, with Buchka's essay narrated over the images from film clips of 1920s era German films.
As a young Soviet student in 1978, Ieva could not have predicted that a holiday visit to her father, Imants Lesinskis, then working in the Soviet mission at the United Nations in New York City, would irreversibly split her life in two. Entangled in a dark spy game, Ieva is forced to leave her former life behind, never to see her mother or her homeland of Latvia again. Pulling back the curtain on the shady behind-the-scenes world of the Cold War, this film tells a daughter's dramatic story of her double-agent father, exploring their relationship against the backdrop of events which have their roots over four decades ago. In order to find herself and understand the game she was part of, Ieva sets out on a journey to the past, confronting family secrets, lies and betrayal.
The only novel written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1958), just like its screen adaptation by Luchino Visconti, is considered a masterpiece. This film tells about the life of Tomasi and his German-Baltic wife Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee – their unusual love story. The chaos of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and World War II forced Alexandra to leave St. Petersburg and later on – the family's castle in Stāmeriena, Latvia. During the war, in 1943, she fled to her husband in Palermo, where she would live until the day she died.
A journey into the incredible life of Klaus Voormann. An inside view into the history of Rock'n'Roll. A story of friendship, art and music. Klaus Voormann was on the frontlines of the pop era's meteoric rise.
Enquiries into the murder of a young woman take the private investigator Peter Keller to the idyllic village of Schwant in Emmental. But, the more entangled Keller gets in the treads of the apparently clearcut case of sex murder, the more obvious the flaws in the village idyll become. Keller's quest turns into a deadly mission.
What is the secret of Germany's most successful hip-hop band? What makes them different? How did they make their mark in German pop culture and develop over the years? A behind-the-scenes look at a band that has written German music history and continues to do so.
A young wheelchair user who wins a surfboard at a folk festival uses it to make contact with the world around him. Over the course of a summer, which also takes him to Lourdes, he learns a lot about love and "miracles".
The psychiatrist Simon embarks with his newly wed Paula on a wedding trip to Marmorera, the home of his ancestors. The body of a young woman is found on the shore of the reservoir. A little later, the same woman - alive but without an identity - was taken to the Psychiatric University Clinic Burgholzli in Zurich, where Simon works. The idea of the film is based on a true story: in 1954 the entire old Marmorera was demolished and flooded to prevent protests against the planned dam above the village. Only the cemetery with the bones of the dead was moved.
A German-born director of an American television station travels through Bavaria with a folk music impresario to do research for a show to be broadcast directly to the United States. He comes into contact with all kinds of people and all kinds of different expressions of Bavarian folk music.
A teenage runaway who never went to school, John Lee Hooker had trouble spelling his name, even into his eighties. But, despite these humble beginnings, John Lee Hooker is today considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.
Various Hollywood people talk about love.
Reencounter with a myth. 40 years since Georg Stefan Troller reported from his adopted home in "Pariser Journal," he returns to his old haunts. A journey through time in a city of contradictions that is always reinventing itself.
7 DAYS IN SEPTEMBER is the adventurous story of two exceptional mountaineers, Benedikt Böhm and his partner Sebastian Haag, trying to set a world record speed ascent to the 8,163-m peak of Manaslu in the Himalayas. It's a story of friendship and rivalry, and of their desire to risk everything, including family responsibilities. 7 DAYS IN SEPTEMBER also tells the tale of those who set out with the same vision, like mountaineer legends Silvio Mondinelli or Rémy Lécluse, but whose lives changed forever in a fatal avalanche catastrophe. The film is a personal exploration of one of the most tragic dramas in Himalayan mountaineering history. What drives people to risk their lives like this again and again? What does it mean for the bereaved to love a person whose passion seems to be contrary to all rationality?
On 20 July 1944, an assassination attempt was made on the life of Adolf Hitler; its failure and that of the coup d'état planned to follow, Operation Valkyrie, lead to the arrest and execution of thousands of people. In his film, "The Traitors' Children", Christian Weisenborn presents harrowing encounters with the children of the executed conspirators, while also taking a look at his own family history. His parents belonged to a group of anti-fascists, which the Gestapo called the "Rote Kapelle" (the red chapel). Weisenborn's parents survived, but 52 of their friends were hanged in Plötzensee in 1942/43. Weisenborn also interviewed their sons and daughters.
