Germany, Year Zero
"A soldier can lose everything but his courage."
In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.
"A soldier can lose everything but his courage."
In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.
Edmund Moeschke
Edmund
Ernst Pittschau
Father
Ingetraud Hinze
Eva
Franz-Otto Krüger
Karl-Heinz
Erich Gühne
Teacher
Heidi Blänkner
Frau Rademaker (uncredited)
Jo Herbst
Jo (uncredited)
Barbara Hintz
Thilde (uncredited)
Adolf Hitler
Self (archive footage) (voice) (uncredited)
In the ruins of post-WWII Berlin, a twelve-year-old boy is left to his own devices in order to help provide for his family.
What an awful position the despicable Nazis left their descendants at the close of the Second World War. Rossellini has the perfect, objective, almost documentarian painterly hand in his depiction of this, and I have the feeling that only someone from one of the losing Axis countries, such as he, could so astutely and profoundly bring across such a feeling of loss and guilt that haunted these 'survivors'. A very sad film to watch, yet at the very same time necessary and healing. Clearly my favourite of his works, next to his magnificent 'The Flowers of St. Francis'.
Edmund Moeschke ("Edmund") is superb in this gritty and authentic looking post-war story of a young boy struggling, with his family, to make ends meet in Berlin after the fall of the Nazis. Scrounging, scrimping, scavenging - all to try and keep his ailing father and the rest of his family fed and warm. It is tightly cast and the scenarios - filmed just three years after the allies reduced much of the city to rubble are very poignant; the photography and sparing dialogue all lend well to the gently accumulating sense of desperation that culminates in tragedy. The children bring optimism and hope to the story - their innocence writ large as they embark on a new life for them as did the rest of Europe in 1948. Well worth a watch.
Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.
While subjected to the horrors of WWII Germany, young Liesel finds solace by stealing books and sharing them with others. Under the stairs in her home, a Jewish refugee is being sheltered by her adoptive parents.
Alex is an 11-year old boy who, during WWII, hides in the Jewish ghetto from Nazis after all his relatives have been sent to the concentration camp. The movie portrays the ghetto through his eyes.
In late 1940s Italy, a mother makes the difficult decision to send her son to the north, where he catches glimpses of a new life away from poverty.
In postwar Germany, a displaced Czech boy, separated from his family during wartime, is befriended by an American GI while the boy's mother desperately searches for him.
During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.
Maria Altmann, an octogenarian Jewish refugee, takes on the government to recover artwork she believes rightfully belongs to her family.
When his family moves from their home in Berlin to a strange new house in Poland, young Bruno befriends Shmuel, a boy who lives on the other side of the fence where everyone seems to be wearing striped pajamas. Unaware of Shmuel's fate as a Jewish prisoner or the role his own Nazi father plays in his imprisonment, Bruno embarks on a dangerous journey inside the camp's walls.
Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.
Dramatization depicting the events surrounding Adolf Hitler's last weeks in and around his underground bunker in Berlin before and during the battle for the city.