A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.
Tag: GERMANY
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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 undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio’s safety in insidious ways.
Jonnie has just started a new band in Berlin but the new capital is suffering racial tension and growing pains since the fall of the wall. Rising prices, housing shortages, and cut-throat speculation threatens the existence of the Rock house where she and other bands rehearse. The community is at stake and her new boyfriends subversive group have a plan to strike back.
The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berflede. Miss Charlotte survived the Nazi reign and the repression of the Communists as a transvestite and helped start the German gay liberation movement. Documentary with some dramatized scenes. Two actors play the young and middle aged Charlotte and she plays herself in the later years.
Evidently shot over a decade, this documentary portrait of Lithuanian-born filmmaker-poet Jonas Mekas examines his life and career as a director (The Brig, Guns of the Trees), film critic, film historian, magazine editor, teacher (NYU), film distributor (Film-Makers’ Cooperative), and founder of Manhattan’s leading avant-garde film showcase (Anthology Film Archives). Mekas had a significant influence on the New York avant-garde, as indicated in interview segments with Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Martin Scorsese, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Past films made by Mekas are seen in clips. German filmmaker Peter Sempel has chosen to assemble this profile in an oblique and elliptical manner not inappropriate for his unique subject.
This Weimar Germany film classic uses an avant-garde, fragmented narrative to tell the story of a working-class family in Berlin in 1931. Survival is difficult, with massive unemployment in the wake of the Great Depression. After Anni’s brother commits suicide in despair, her family finds itself forced to move to Kuhle Wampe, a lakeside camp on the outskirts of Berlin, now home to increasing numbers of unemployed. When Anni’s relationship with Franz ends, she moves back to Berlin and gets involved in the workers’ youth movement. Already censored in March 1932, the film was then banned by the Nazis in 1933 for having “communist tendencies.”
Comedy shot without a script on Super-8mm as a silent film, with intertitles later inserted between scenes. What unfolds is a familiar Achternbusch tale in which the protagonist (here his alter-ego, Hick) is driven by a mad longing and becomes irretrievably lost. Unable to meet the demands of the workaday world, Hick wanders alone through the city and, as in many of Achternbusch’s films, enters an intermediate realm in which the dead interact with the living: he encounters and falls in love with a mummy, searches for an Egyptian queen, and stalks the inner regions of the hereafter, which lie in the middle of Munich.
Extending his fascination with genre cinema, Petzold’s second feature is a made-for-television variation on the 1945 noir Detour, transposing Ulmer’s Poverty Row classic from the gloomy backroads of postwar America to the drab railway stations and sunlit autobahns of 1990s Europe. Across this colorless landscape, homeless drifter Tom tracks ex-lover-turned-prostitute Tina with the questionable assistance of a slick rich guy named Jimmy, pursuing parallel paths on a desperate odyssey westward that just might lead all the way to Cuba.