German Language Resources: German films

Out of nowhere, Katja's life falls apart when her husband Nuri and little son Rocco are killed in a bomb attack. Her friends and family try to give her the support she needs, and Katja somehow manages to make it through the funeral. But the mind-numbing search for the perpetrators and reasons behind the senseless killing complicate Katja s painful mourning, opening wounds and doubts. Danilo, a lawyer and Nuri's best friend, represents Katja in the eventual trial against the two suspects: a young couple from the neo-Nazi scene. The trial pushes Katja to the edge, but there's simply no alternative for her: she wants justice.

In Blind Spot - Hitler's Secretary, Traudl Junge describes on camera for the first time her experience working as one of Adolf Hitler's private secretaries from 1942 until his suicide in 1945. After keeping quiet for nearly 60 years, Frau Junge tells the riveting story of working alongside Hitler until the final collapse of the Nazi regime. Frau Junge is one of only a handful of witnesses to Hitler's last days in his fortified bunker as the Third Reich was collapsing above them. In his final hours, he dictated his final will and testament to her. Frau Junge also worked with Hitler at Wolf s Lair (his field headquarters in East Prussia), at his Bavarian residence at Berchtesgaden and on the Führer s special train. In Spring 2001, André Heller met Traudl Junge and was able to persuade her that it would be fascinating as well as historically important to make a record of her unique experiences... and of her present attitudes to that time, after years of contemplation and self-analysis.

Love can sneak up on you at any point. Inge, a married seamstress in her 60s, delivers a pair of trousers to her customer, Karl, himself well into his 70s. Shortly after, the two of them are making passionate love on the floor of his apartment. This is all the more surprising as Inge has been happily married for over 30 years, and suddenly she feels like a young girl again. Whether you are 70 or 17, affairs of the heart can be complicated!

Sonya is a German high school student who decides to write an essay about her town's history during the Third Reich and its resistance to it. To her dismay, and more so the town's, she uncovers instead definite collaboration during the period. As she digs deeper, she must struggle against the town's vocal and violent opposition to her search for the truth.

Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years just before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. The abused and suppressed children of the villagers seem to be at the heart of this mystery.

Germany, 1968: The priest's daughters Marianna and Juliane both fight for changes in society, like making abortion legal. However their means are totally different: while Juliane's committed as a reporter, her sister joins a terroristic organization. After she's caught by the police and put into isolation jail, Juliane remains as her last connection to the rest of the world. Although she doesn't accept her sister's arguments and her boyfriend Wolfgang doesn't want her to, Juliane keeps on helping her sister. She begins to question the way her sister is treated.

Nejat seems disapproving about his widower father Ali's choice of prostitute Yeter for a live-in girlfriend. But he grows fond of her when he discovers she sends money home to Turkey for her daughter's university studies. Yeter's sudden death distances father and son. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter Ayten. Political activist Ayten has fled the Turkish police and is already in Germany. She is befriended by a young woman, Lotte, who invites rebellious Ayten to stay in her home, a gesture not particularly pleasing to her conservative mother Susanne. When Ayten is arrested and her asylum plea is denied, she is deported and imprisoned in Turkey. Lotte travels to Turkey,where she gets caught up in the seemingly hopeless situation of freeing Ayten.

One day Joseph suddenly retires from his job as a school teacher in Prague after an encounter with an unruly pupil and his frustration over the changing values and increased power given the students. A man full of humour and playful energy, he is not content to spend the autumn of his life in the uneventful bosom of his family. Another joint project by Oscar-winning duo Jan Sverák and Zden k Sverák, EMPTIES is an intelligent, emotionally engaging comedy about finding meaning and love in later life.

The movie is based on the infamous "Stanford Prison Experiment" conducted in 1971. A makeshift prison is set up in a research lab, complete with cells, bars and surveillance cameras. For two weeks 20 male participants are hired to play prisoners and guards. The 'prisoners' are locked up and have to follow seemingly mild rules, and the 'guards' are told simply to retain order without using physical violence. Everybody is free to quit at any time, thereby forfeiting payment. In the beginning the mood between both groups is insecure and rather emphatic. But soon quarrels arise and the wardens employ ever more drastic sanctions to confirm their authority.

Corinna Belz's documentary is an unprecedented and oddly dangerous journey into the studios of Gerhard Richter, widely considered among the world's most important living painters. Famously cranky and iconoclastic, Richter is an ideal subject to illuminate the deep fissures in the contemporary art world. His career has been a high-wire balancing act between eye-popping, colourful abstractions — seen in start-to-finish construction throughout much of the film — and enormously famous photorealist portraiture. He has also been an influential essayist on the subject of art-making and its place in the world.

East Berlin, November 1984. Five years before its downfall, the former East-German government ensured its claim to power with a ruthless system of control and surveillance. Party-loyalist Captain Gerd Wiesler hopes to boost his career when given the job of collecting evidence against the playwright Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, the celebrated theater actress Christa-Maria Sieland. After all, the "operation" is backed by the highest political circles. What he didn't anticipate, however, was that submerging oneself into the world of the target also changes the surveillance agent. The immersion in The Lives of Others - in love, literature, free thinking and speech - makes Wiesler acutely aware of the meagerness of his own existence and opens to him a completely new way of life which he has ever more trouble resisting. But the system, once started, cannot be stopped. A dangerous game has begun...

Peter Lorre plays his greatest role as a child murderer in this classic social melodrama based on the actual Dusseldorf murders in 1929. The efficient organization of the underworld in tracking down the murderer is set against the incompetence of the police force.

In 1910, young Adolf Hitler migrates to the cultural beacon of Vienna, determined to conquer the world as a famous painter. Upon his arrival, he moves into a hostel occupied by Schlomo, an elderly Jewish Bible salesman who takes the brash and arrogant artist under his wing. But when Hitler is callously rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts, Schlomo attempts to save his increasingly radical and suicidal disciple by pushing him towards a career in politics a fateful and ironic decision that will forever impact the course of human history.

In a German restaurant, Chef Martha Klein is the undisputed supreme ruler of the kitchen staff and woe to any customer who would dare criticize her cooking. Her life is firmly centered around cooking which takes on a obsessive level with stubborn single mindedness. Even when she is ordered to take therapy, she still constantly talks about her work and the iron clad control she relishes in her task. All that changes when her sister dies in a car accident, leaving her 8 year old daughter, Lina. Martha takes her niece in and while making enquiries for her estranged father, she struggles to care for this stubbornly headstrong child. Meanwhile at work, a new chef named Mario is hired on and Martha feels threatened by this unorthodox intruder. The pressures of both her private and work life combine to create a situation that will fundamentally call her attitudes and life choices into question while these interlopers into her life begin to profound change it.

The Jewish family Redlich emigrates to Kenya in 1938, where Walter Redlich (Merab Ninidze), a lawyer, works on a farm as a caretaker. While his wife Jettel (Juliane Köhler), a daughter from a bourgeois home, finds it difficult to adjust to their new life, their shy daughter Regina (Lea Kurka/Karoline Eckertz) blossoms. She learns the local language and customs and finds a good friend in the cook Owuor (Sidede Onyulo). The loss of their home and relatives, as well as their inability to talk about this, endangers the marriage of Jettel and Walter. Only slowly do they find their way back to each other. When the war is finally over, Walter is offered a position as a judge in Frankfurt. But after all those years where they learned to cherish their life in Kenya, it is doubtful whether Jettel and Regina will accompany him back to Germany.

G.W. Pabst's film that catapulted Louise Brooks to international acclaim and made her 'the' icon of the Jazz Age tells the tragic story of Lulu, the hedonistic dancer and prostitute. Based on the plays of F. Wedekind.

Michaela leaves home, and a deeply religious family, to study at university. Embracing her first taste of freedom, she enjoys a budding romantic relationship and a new friendship until her epilepsy relapses and brings with it a frightening onrush of grotesque faces and voices. Michaela seeks help from a priest, who reinforces her conviction that she is possessed. Soon even her friends can't break through the religious and moral ties that bind her to her fate. Based on a true story.

Schultze is a retired lignite miner living in an East German village and a passionate Polka musician on his accordion. One night he listens to a Zydeco tune in the radio, which changes his taste of music radically. Notwithstanding his complete ignorance of the English language he starts a trip into the heart of the Zydeco; to Louisana.

The true story of Germany's most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama SOPHIE SCHOLL-THE FINAL DAYS. Academy Award Nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, SOPHIE SCHOLL stars Julia Jentsch in a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist. In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.

The true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and bohemian. After getting arrested in a German concentration camp in 1944, he agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeit operation set up to help finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit money scam of all times. Over 130 million pound sterling were printed, under conditions that couldn t have been more tragic or spectacular. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to use the duds to flood the enemy economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. Operation Bernhard was born. Prisoners were brought to Sachsenhausen from other camps to implement the plan: professional printers, fastidious bank officials and simple craftsmen all became members of the top-secret counterfeiter commando. They had the choice: if they cooperated with the enemy, they had a chance to survive, as first-class prisoners in a golden cage with enough to eat and a bed to sleep in. If they sabotaged the operation, a sure death awaited them. For THE COUNTERFEITERS, it was not only a question of saving their own lives, but also about saving their conscience as well

High school teacher, Rainer Wegner, may be popular with the students, but he's also unorthodox. He's forced to teach autocracy for the school's project week. He's less than enthusiastic at first, but the response of the students is surprising to say the least. He forces the students to become more invested in the prospect of self rule, and soon the class project has its own power and eerily starts to resemble Germany's past. Can Wegner and his class realize what's happening before the horrors start repeating themselves?