Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play Samfundets Stotter (Pillars of Society) was the source for this German drama. The plot centers upon a flagrant case of municipal corruption, carried out by the town’s “finest” people. The selfishness of the elite results in widespread tragedy, yet still the perpetrators hypocritically blame everyone but themselves.
Tag: GERMANY
A boy and his mother stay in a hotel near a lake. The teenager meets a fascinating man who can be a singer, a conjurer, and can take him for a ride in his sports-car. Then the mother seems attracted by the man too. The boy’s jealousy rises, culminating in a scene on the road at night where he waits for the man who is stealing his mum. He discovers how hard it is growing up. Is he himself in love with his mother, or does he fear his parents’ marriage may be in jeopardy?
Max Allan, a visionary engineer persuades investors to fund building an undersea railway connecting France to the United States. But there are powerful forces who wants to stop his futuristic dream.
Petra professionally works as a thief abroad to finance the studies of her younger sister Franziska in Germany. When she returns, she realizes that her sister has a secret, too.
A desperate group of people wait at a rundown Cuban transit station for the next bus to arrive. The problem is, it never shows up. While a number of busses pass by the station, and others that are either full or at the end of the line stop by, it soon becomes obvious that the bus everyone was waiting for has left them high and dry. While one of the would-be passengers, Emilio, uses his downtime to win the affections of the beautiful Jacqueline, most of the rest decide that if they’re stuck without anywhere to go, they might as well make the station a better place to wait, and they begin forming a plan to turn the decrepit bus terminal into a showplace that people would look forward to visiting.
Elske faithfully loves her husband Endrik as he is seduced by a foreign schemer, Madlyn. Madlyn persuades him to murder Elske and run off with her. He lures Elske into the boat as a prelude to drowning her, but is unable to carry it out. When they reach the shore, she flees to the city, and he follows to plead for forgiveness. They return, and a storm blows up while they are in the boat. Endrik gets ashore, but believes Elske to have drowned.
In 1942, in Vilnius, the Nazi annihilate 55,000 Jews and squeeze the 15,000 survivors in a seven blocks ghetto. The twenty-two year old sadistic commander Kittel is assigned to administrate the ghetto in the capital of Lithuania, becoming the master of life or death. When he finds the gorgeous Hayyah sneaking with one kilo of beans stolen from the German army, he sentences her to death; but when he is informed that she was a former successful singer, he decides to activate the old theater and promote shows in the ghetto. The Jewish Chief of Police, Gens, uses the theater and a sewing factory to save as much lives as he can; in his ambiguous position, he kills Jews to save lives of others.