Isabelle Kahn is a successful film actress whose young daughter, Emily, is frequently cared for by her parents in Normandy while she’s away working. After a production ends in Berlin, she returns to visit her daughter. However, the rejoicing is short-lived. Her smitten costar follows, and his presence sets off an intense clash between the self-centered thespian and her mother.
Tag: WEST GERMANY
In a future ruled by a corporate monopoly, a machine capable of fulfilling every human desire transforms society and renders genuine relationships obsolete. As a marginalized young woman is absorbed into the system, she confronts a world increasingly defined by consumption, control, and isolation.
Set in a shadowy realm of “Dark Romanticism,” on an island in a mysterious lake. The inhabitants are a beautiful vampire, a hunchbacked prince, a black magician, the Erl Queen and other creatures, as well as their victims. It is the story of the eerie rituals that take place in the eternal twilight.
An intellectual is exiled to a small, isolated mountain village in southeastern Turkey to work as a schoolteacher. The inhabitants have to fight a perpetual battle against hostile nature, and the teacher tries to combat the inhuman reality of this place where misery, indifference and the impossibility of communication reign. In this village, tragedy is trivialized by repetition and habit. But the children who remain have a marvelous will to survive…
A deliciously perverse rendition of Madame Bovary, The Stationmaster’s Wife is one of Fassbinder’s most entertaining films. Set in a small Bavarian town in pre-Hitler Germany, the film features Kurt Raab as the Stationmaster Bolwieser, a man sexually enslaved by his beautiful wife Hanni, a woman of uncontrollable passion. Soon bored with both her husband and life at the train station, Hanni embarks on a series of adulterous affairs, while the deluded Bolwieser grows progressively sullen and glum. The Stationmaster’s Wife is a haunting exploration of desire and betrayal, with a radiantly lusty performance by Elisabeth Trissenaar.
In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents’ villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother’s depression, and her mother’s suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. “Is my life real, or is it theater?” This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.
Set in the refined world of the Jugendstil era, Die schwarze Katze tells the story of a man whose seemingly stable life begins to crumble under the weight of obsession, guilt, and drink. His once gentle affection for animals turns into tormenting fear, embodied by a mysterious black cat that seems to haunt his every step. Blending psychological tension with gothic elegance, Karl-Heinz Kramberg’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale explores how madness and conscience can entwine—until the boundary between reality and nightmare vanishes.
In this modern adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, a lonely man in Munich becomes obsessed with an old man’s strange, pale eye, which seems to torment his every thought. His fixation drives him to commit a carefully planned murder. Shot in stark black and white, the film captures the descent of a rational mind into paranoia and insanity.