Die Dichter und die Räterepublik

Documentary film with play scenes about the rise and fall of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 from the perspective of various well-known poets and writers who experienced the events as contemporary witnesses.

Die kalten Ringe

19 years after the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan, the Olympic Games of 1964 took place in Tokyo. In the midst of the cold war, the games are supposed to become a symbol for a peaceful world. Especially the divided Germany is expected to prove this: By order of the IOC, both German states must participate in Tokyo with a joint team despite deep ideological rifts. The fact that athletes from both German states still had to compete against each other in order to form a joint team for the 1964 Olympic Games in Innsbruck and in Tokyo is all but forgotten. The film tells the story of the East-West German team of 1964 for the first time and is simultaneously a current document about the relation of sports and politics in international relations.

Verbotene Liebe - Queere Opfer der NS-Diktatur

Sexual minorities were oppressed, imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. Paragraph 175 criminalized homosexual men during the Nazi era – but the Nazis also discriminated against lesbians and trans people. They should be excluded from the national community. More than 50,000 queer people have been proven to have been persecuted. The documentary highlights three poignant fates in the context of Nazi terror.

Avant la catastrophe - La Chute de la République de Weimar (1930-1933)

Grenze

In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.

Berlin - Paris: Die Geschichte der Beate Klarsfeld

With her slap of the Federal Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger in 1968, Beate Klarsfeld abruptly got known worldwide. The film highlights the significance of this act and its background. Beate Klarsfeld, born in Berlin in 1939 as Beate Künzel, is primarily known to people as "the woman with the slap" and as the Nazi hunter. In 1960 she went to Paris and met her future husband Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. She was confronted with the darkest part of German history, about which she had learned nothing at school. Serge gave her books to read and made her actively deal with them. Since then, she has not let go of dealing with the crimes of the Nazi era. For them, it was always about "responsibility, not guilt".

Les junkies d'Adolf Hitler

In Third Reich, the abuse of drugs made commanders and soldiers feel invincible. The Führer himself took them on daily basis. This is the unbelievable story of the D-IX project and of methamphetamines, which, abundantly furnished to soldiers, changed the course of history.

Verbotene Filme

Between 1933 and 1945 roughly 1200 films were made in Germany, of which 300 were banned by the Allied forces. Today, around 40 films, called "Vorbehaltsfilme", are locked away from the public with an uncertain future. Should they be re-released, destroyed, or continue to be neglected? Verbotene Filme takes a closer look at some of these forbidden films.

Le Temps des assassins

La langue ne ment pas

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), a professor of literature in Dresden, was Jewish; through the efforts of his wife, he survived the war. From 1933 when Hitler came to power to the war's end, he kept a journal paying attention to the Nazis' use of words. This film takes the end of 1945 as its vantage point, with a narrator looking back as if Klemperer reads from his journal. He examines the use of simple words like "folk," "eternal," and "to live." Interspersed are personal photographs, newsreel footage of Reich leaders and of life in Germany then, and a few other narrative devices. Although he's dispassionate, Klemperer's fear and dread resonate

Fascism in Colour

After the World War I, Mussolini's perspective on life is severely altered; once a willful socialist reformer, now obsessed with the idea of power, he founds the National Fascist Party in 1921 and assumes political power in 1922, becoming the Duce, dictator of Italy. His success encourages Hitler to take power in Germany in 1933, opening the dark road to World War II. (Originally released as a two-part miniseries. Includes colorized archival footage.)

Wer war Hitler

Hitler's biography told like never before. Besides brief historical localizations by a narrator, only contemporaries and Hitler himself speak: no interviews, no reenactment, no illustrative graphics and no technical gadgets. The testimonies from diaries, letters, speeches and autobiographies are assembled with new, often unpublished archive material. Hitler's life and work are thus reflected in a unique way in interaction with the image of the society in the years 1889 to 1945.

Unendlicher Raum

Loitz is one of those former GDR towns that still suffer from the effects of German reunification. For a year "Infinite Place" looks behind the gray facade of the seemingly dying town and questions concepts of home and identity through the perspective of its old and new inhabitants. The town’s vacancy and people’s urge for self-realization create a fruitful look into the future.

100 Jahre UFA - Maschinenraum des deutschen Films

The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.

Polen 39: Wie deutsche Soldaten zu Mördern wurden

September 1st, 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland. The campaign is fast, cruel and ruthless. In these circumstances, how is it that ordinary German soldiers suddenly became vicious killers, terrorizing the local population? Did everyone turn into something worse than wild animals? The true story of the first World War II offensive that marks in the history of infamy the beginning of a carnage and a historical tragedy.

Hitler: The Comedy Years

A documentary about the portrayal of Adolf Hitler in popular culture.

Karajan – Porträt eines Maestros

An account of the life and work of controversial German orchestra conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-89), celebrated as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.

Repetitioner

The theatre 7:3 project was conducted at the Tidaholm prison 1998-1999. What started as an artistic experiment, ended up in police killings at Malexander. The process in the prison were filmed during 6 months.

Ţara Moartă: fragmente de vieţi paralele

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

Murder in Malexander

Depicts the controversial double police murder, involving neo-nazism and a theatre project by one of Scandinavia's most celebrated playwrights. The film traces a complex and fascinating chain of events leading up to the fatal climax in the picturesque small town of Malexander, Sweden.