The story of a German singer named Willie who while working in Switzerland falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert whose family is helping...

Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to...

When 17-year-old Effi Briest marries the elderly Baron von Instetten, she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is...

A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets...

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover...

An investigative portrait of the master of cinematic melodrama, Douglas Sirk. His life was the ultimate melodrama, from which all his films were...

The life of a married Munich technical draftsman with a son.

Hans is a street fruit peddler and born-loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After...

Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and...

The lives of six German-Turkish immigrants are drawn together by circumstance: An old man and a prostitute forging a partnership, a young scholar...

Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live....

A deeply felt personal story of Hanna Schygulla filmed in 2012 at a moment when she was moving back to Germany, to Berlin, having lived for twenty...

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos moves in,...

In 1949, composer Roman Strauss is executed for the murder of his wife. In 1990s Los Angeles, a detective comes across a mute amnesiac woman who is...

Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.

While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did...

Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he's refused to join.

Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature....

During the French Revolution, a surprising company shares a coach, trying to catch up something - the time itself, perhaps.

Anna is a psychologist undertaking research about famous suicidal women. She takes a specific interest in the case of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who...

Verging on Alzheimer’s, an aging actress (played by Hanna Schygulla) finds that the power of memory is stronger than ever.

A 707 aircraft jetliner, en route from Athens to Rome and then to New York City, is hijacked by Lebanese terrorists, who demand that the pilot take...

Nineteen people with differing degrees of visual impairment – from mild nearsightedness to total blindness – discuss how they see...

Georg Laschen leaves his family in West Germany to go work as a war correspondent in Beirut during the fights between Christians and Palestinians.

"Promised Land" tells the story of a group of young unwitting Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to be auctioned off as prostitutes in Israel, and...

Peter von Kant, a successful, famous director, lives with his assistant Karl, whom he likes to mistreat and humiliate. Through the great actress...

In this improbable, ponderous story about a couple who do not want to have children of their own, and a pregnant, single woman who needs a home for...

A documentary about Marcello Mastroianni.

Piera is a young woman who grows up under the parentage of two extremely original overseers: both her mother and father have incestuous relations...

Two very different love stories cross each other in warm and magical way. A humanistic and yet mysterious film about love and death near the...

Despite advancing age, rural businessman Franz has remained fit and energetic, but serious mental illness and financial problems mean that this...

This movie is about love affairs, simple pleasures of a few men and women who will gather for a few days in a villa, around a piano and the music of...

Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all...

A doctor in early 19th-century Germany becomes infatuated with the sister of a man he unintentionally killed and bargains with the Devil incarnate to...

"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive...

A documentary about the Director Fassbinder but edited as if it was a film of the Master himself, with some sequences of his own movies.

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to...

A wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which...

A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their...

Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the...

Abram returns to his small village and although his repairing skills are needed, people's suspicion about his sexual preferences make his life hard.

In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with...

A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring an assembly of German filmmakers.

Documentary musing upon the work of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge.

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery...

Mavi Sürgün is a fictionalized account of one period of the life of a Turkish journalist who was condemned to exile for an article he wrote...

Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's...

Avant-garde adaptation of a Carlo Goldoni play. Well-to-do Venetians congregate in a coffee house and discuss their problems.

Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut...

A documentary by Hans Günther Pflaum and Peter H. Schröder.

MARIANNE (Evabritt Strandberg) is a 68-year old woman diagnosed with a terminal disease. Left with angst, she seeks therapy at a clinic where she is...

Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by Amercian studio...

Rosita Hernandez, a nine-year-old Indio girl, tells about the everyday life of her family living in the the desert plain between the Andes and the...

Documentary directed by Hans Rolf Strobel

Munir travels to a remote island to contemplate a drastic action. He is haunted by a cryptic parable passed down to him by his mother. In the silence...

About the making of "Der amerikanische Soldat/The American Soldier" in 1970.

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young...

Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole...

Ernest, Ted and August fulfill their friend Carl's dying wish and take him to Heidelberg, where they all first met 45 years ago, to see his old...

A company of Spanish movie makers leaves Franco's Spain and moves to Hitler's Germany to make a film in co-production. Soon some problems start to...

Baal explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in...

On the Schiermoser farm tense expectation prevails. The 'Urban', the Schaubleins, surprisingly announced their arrival. In the past, they were...

In this tragic melodrama, a man who has been hiding his Nazi past has it come back to haunt him when his hippie daughter, whom he disapproves of,...

An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the...

An actor and poet falls in love with a former mortuary photographer turned waitress. They find themselves caught up way over their heads in a dirty...

A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality.

Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some...

51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father...

The life story of an 18th century womanizer who's arrested, not so much for his crimes, but because he's viewed as an undesirable by the husbands and...

Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol...

When Elaine, an adventurous young woman from Germany, arrives in New York City, she sets out to be a famous writer. After a brief stint at a mundane...

Magdalena Hausen, a German artist, tried to capture the wind on camera. Her life story, from early years to mysterious disappearance 15 years ago.

In a small town plunged into darkness, two children, Kyona and Adriel, are separated from their parents and, facing the path of exile alone, embark...

Adaptation of Robert Walser's novel about a young man who enters an oppressive servant school.

Mrs. Forbes, a German governess, is hired for six weeks to take care of two children, while their parents are away. She is authoritarian and...

The amazing biography of legendary circus impresario and unparalleled showman, P.T. Barnum.

An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."

A writer struggles with her daughter's decision to drop out of college and live on the streets.

What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is...

In Paris, unhappy movie actress Catherine Crachat becomes infatuated with the mathematician Pierre Indemini, but then breaks up with him. After a...

A documentary about the making of the television mini-series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including interviewees with the principal actors.

The story of a young mother with a failed marriage behind her, who fights daily for her dream to open a hair salon, challenging her fate in an effort...

A documentary that focuses on the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun".

Thomas is a drug addict. In an effort to put an end to his habit, he joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains and use...

Documentary about the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 German television series EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY, featuring interviews with...

Jack Altieri, a young Italian-American restaurant owner, arrives at Vesta awaits him a painting of the sixteenth century that depicts the veiled face...

Short film based on Thomas Mann's short story "Der Kleiderschrank".

Story of the owners (Mastroianni and Schygulla) of a fancy nightclub in Budapest before and during WWII.

Unique archives show a world that no longer exists: pre-war Poland in which two cultures: Jewish and Polish, coexisted wall-in-wall; cottage in a...

Women were clearly at the core of legendary photographer Helmut Newton's work. The stars of his iconic portraits and fashion editorials – from...

In a bizarre Breton library that collects rejected, never published manuscripts, a young editor discovers a novel that she considers a masterpiece....

The story of Irmi Selver, who lost her family while fleeing Germany in 1939 and overcame tragedy and upheavals to establish a new life in New York.

"End of the Commune"/"Ende einer kommune" is a great 49 min. long movie made in 1969 about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater...

Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of his 1982 film Passion. “I didn’t...

Marco Ferreri: Dangerous But Necessary is a trip through the auteur's singular cosmos - at once supernatural and earthbound. He dropped out of his...

When her elderly father has a stroke, Emmanuelle rushes to his bedside. Sick and half-paralysed in his hospital bed, he asks Emmanuelle to help him...

Images and sounds expose the duality of Portugal during the days of WW2: a peaceful, god-loving, rural country, providing an escape route for over...

The extraordinary story of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940), creator of Nils Holgersson, a memorable and legendary literary character,...

The film intertwines historical events and intimate memories. I observe how architecture represents the transformations of society and those who give...

Notes on the movie Passion

Commissioned to make a working-class family drama for public television, up-and-coming director Rainer Werner Fassbinder took the assignment and ran,...

A miniseries about a pair of teenagers living in a slum at the fringes of Berlin. Alcoholism, prostitution, and violence are just a few of the themes...

In late 1920s Berlin, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and vows to go straight. However, he soon finds himself embroiled in the city’s...

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss, crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the...

Peter the Great is a 1986 NBC television mini-series starring Maximilian Schell as Russian emperor Peter the Great, and based on the biography by...

Stolberg is a German detective television series, starring chief inspector Martin Stolberg. The series is more serious and less flashy than other...

In a future where regeneration technology lets humans live indefinitely, a cop and a troubled young woman investigate a strange wave of youth...

The Bambi, often called the Bambi Award and stylised as BAMBI, is a German award presented annually by Hubert Burda Media to recognize excellence in...

Reinhold Beckmann hosts a weekly talk show.