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"He was attractive, cultivated, very sensitive, very empathetic". Lawyer Astrid Wagner's first impression when meeting the serial killer Jack Unterweger. As a young law student she had close contact with him: "It was a nice feeling to be needed." On June 28, 1994 Unterweger is convicted for the murder of nine prostitutes. Six hours later, he hangs himself in his cell. Twenty years later, Thema unrolls the incredible story of the woman murderer and asks former friends and other companions how Jack Unterweger influenced their lives.

This 1999 program, broadcast on the Russian television channel Kultura, features an introduction by filmmaker Elem Klimov and film critic Irina Rubanova to an interview with director Larisa Shepitko that was recorded just after the 1978 Berlin International Film Festival.

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

An issue of the magazine Kino 81, designed for the film department of WDR by staff of FILMKRITIK

The Silent Revolution is a 1972 German documentary film about molecular biology. The film posits that biologically, man will still be programmed as a hunter and food collector even when there will be nothing to hunt and collect. Evolution is too slow to cope with the rapid changes in our environment, and the countdown of man's survival has already begun. Yet. there may be a chance to influence the steering mechanism of life. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

The history of the peplum genre, known as sword-and-sandal cinema, set in Antiquity, from the silent film era to the present day.

Using first-hand accounts, award-winning filmmaker Michael Verhoeven goes on a search to unearth evidence documenting one of the greatest robberies in human history.

Four lives that could not be more different and a single passion that unites them: the unconditional love for their cinemas, somewhere at the end of the world. Comrades in Dreams brings together six cinema makers from North Korea, America, India and Africa and follows their efforts to make their audiences dream every night.

With the coronavirus outbreak at Germany's largest meat company, the reputation of the big slaughterhouse is being severely shaken. How responsibly does the "Tönnies system" really work, which ensures cheap meat on German plates?

During the Cold War, many of those who tried to flee westward across the dangerous and blurred line separating communist Czechoslovakia from freedom were gunned down: the story of Europe's deadliest border.

An intimate portrait of Jane Goodall: a radiant spirit with a sharp wit, a deep curiosity about life and death, that next great adventure’ and a remarkable resilience in the face of a changing world.

A dual portrait of young drifters on the streets of Odessa, where every day seems the same and the future keeps getting further away.

Fearless alpine climbers Ueli Steck and Dani Arnold enter into a death-defying rivalry to set speed records on the Swiss Alps' great north faces.

The original Tresor was in many ways the quintessential Berlin club: located in an unrenovated vault beneath a bombed out department store, it opened its doors amidst the general confusion and ecstasy that swept across the city when the wall fell. Its low ceilings, industrial decor and generally unhinged atmosphere created an unprecedented platform not only for techno in Berlin, but also for the scene taking shape across the Atlantic in Detroit.

An entire generation of Germans was raised on male comedians. But what about their female counterparts? Maren Kroymann, Hella von Sinnen, Bettina Böttinger, Esther Schweins, and Gaby Köster look back at the way women were portrayed on TV in the 1990s and early 2000s, when jokes at women’s expense were the order of the day.

Studio recording of Mikrophonie I with the Stockhausen-Ensemble. Short introduction by Stockhausen in French and German.

In her documentary, Larissa Trüby creates an entertaining kaleidoscope on the question of personal happiness. Alongside happiness seekers of all ages, she gives scientists from various disciplines a chance to have their say with their latest research findings. The guide to happiness is multifaceted and the interesting conversations open up new perspectives.

In 1976, a nuclear reactor near the Italian town of Seveso explodes, leaking highly poisonous dioxin into the atmosphere.

For centuries, art has stylised violence against women - and called it beauty. Proserpina (or Persephone) frees herself from Pluto's grip and leads us through masterpieces from antiquity to the present day: from Roman sarcophagi to Bernini, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Marina Abramović. This journey through art history opens up new perspectives on the representation of sexual violence in art.

At 80 years old, German director and photographer Wim Wenders talks about his unwavering joy in creating and telling stories. From "Paris, Texas" to "Perfect Days" and "Wings of Desire," this is a tender and luminous portrait of the most European of filmmakers.

How have the changing views on children been reflected in their representation in art? From Baby Jesus to the first photographic portraits, an exploration of six centuries of art history through the prism of childhood.

A narrative about "the days when the Jews found rest from their enemies and the month that was transformed from pain to joy, from mourning to a feast day." A parable about the courage to arrive in another country and a funny mound of joy about luck in misfortune. Narrated by György Konrád and performed by immigrants from Central and South-Eastern Europe.

After discovering a stranger’s livestream, a month unfolds under his balcony, through watching and being watched.

Max S. reveals how he built a drug empire from his childhood bedroom in this story that inspired the series "How to Sell Drugs Online."

Still today, people say that during the stormy night from March 31st to April 1st, 1922, the devil had come to Hinterkaifeck. On the farmstead near Schrobenhausen, all 6 inhabitants – 4 Adults and two children – are struck down bestially. The police did not manage to seek out the murderer(s). As the case is still unsolved as of today, the story still lives on in the minds of the people. Motion pictures, theatre plays, and the bestselling novel “Tannöd”, behind all of them stands Hinterkaifeck. Aspiring police investigators and a self-declared “Internet – special commission ‘Hinterkaifeck’” have now once again taken up the trail of the case. This exciting search for traces is followed by the film, and its findings are recreated in elaborate play scenes. Thereby, a picture of an era thought to be bygone and an idea of what really happened back then comes into existence. More precise than any fiction, the docudrama manages to get closer to the truth.

Being one of the most significant, contemporary painters, Albert Oehlen’s approach is complete refusal of the common art circus. In its own way the Film reflects this very stance. Likewise, it questions the purpose of obsolete thinking patterns created by white straight male artists of a certain age that have dominated the art world for centuries.

In Bangkok, Thailand, women punch a clock and wait for clients in a brightly lit glass box; in the red-light district of Faridpur, Bangladesh, a madam haggles over the price of a teenage girl; and in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, crack-addicted women pray to a deity named Lady Death.

The cinema documentary Kinders follows children and teenagers of different origins through their sometimes difficult and confusing, sometimes funny and bitter lives. They all take part in the music education program ((superar)), where these neglected and sometimes invisible children develop from outsiders into confident young people who learn about their hidden potentials through the power of music.

A film about poverty in a rich country: father, mother, seven children have made it out of the homeless asylum. The author met the Cologne family B. for the first time in 1976. Living with debts, installments, reminders, living with the certainty that the children will not fare any differently. For more than twenty years, between dreams and fears, the camera recorded two generations' fear of failure and hunger for middle class. A unique film chronicle from the "latest economic miracle" - between 1976 and 1997.

An aspiring documentary filmmaker named Simon Rosenthal tries to get some attention for his film about skinheads versus Turkish immigrants. However, as a Jewish man in today's Germany, his fears for the future prompt him to move to the moon.

Based on their experiences living and working amongst Soviet-era concrete, panel-block apartments, the filmmaker, together with five visual artists, examine past and present attitudes towards their former homes. Combining touching, personal stories with experimental research on the history of twentieth-century art and architecture, the film creates both a compelling narrative, and a contemporary aesthetic of panel-block mass housing using original watercolors, put into motion using digital animation and stop-motion techniques. As global and personal histories interweave, the film explores notions of moral and political responsibility as evinced in physical space.

Explore the tragic truth about the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games in Germany. Through interviews with key people such as the families of slain Olympians, German investigators and an anonymous perpetrator.

At 6am on May 21, 2008, armed police burst into the apartment of Austrian dog trainer and animal-rights activist Sabine Koch, arresting her. After three months in custody, Koch, together with 12 other animal-rights activists, went on trial. They were charged with being members of a criminal organisation and therefore breaching article 273a of the Austrian Penal Code, introduced in the wake of 9/11. The article’s intention is to allow the state to stifle terrorist activity. Years of observation, house searches, and undercover agents – the police left no stone unturned in its bid to prove the animal-rights activists’ guilt. The sobering result: five million Euros worth of investigation, no proof and a great deal of scepticism towards the Austrian justice system – and democracy itself.

An old, broken morin khurr (horse head fiddle) compels renowned Mongolian singer Urna Chahar Tugchi to take a road journey to Ulan Bator and the steppes of Mongolia.

Over the course of a fifty-year career, the British band The Cure has released fourteen highly successful studio albums; but it was their 1989 album Disintegration, released during a pivotal year for Europe and the world, that would capture the imagination of so many fans.

Multilayered documentary about the dissolution of the Ministry for State Security of the GDR: Half a hundred buildings, a thousand rooms, bunkers, its own prisons - the Berlin central complex of the former Ministry of State Security. Workplaces of desk jockeys, hunters, surveillance officers. A labyrinth of human alienation.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous American authors. And probably the most abysmal. In his texts, he deals with the dark side of humanity like no other. And was himself scarred by this throughout his life. The writer not only shaped the genres of horror literature and science fiction novels, but today seems more popular than ever.

The weather station on the Khodovarikha peninsula on the edge of the Russian Arctic Ocean in the Nenets Autonomous District is probably one of the loneliest workplaces in the world. Unimaginably the weather for our weather forecasts is measured there using the simplest of tools without any electronics. The residents are a professional soldier who has been retrained as a meteorologist and was traumatized in the Chechen war, his young wife, whose previous life in the world of cities and money was a brutal failure, a cancer-stricken pensioner who has returned to his birthplace, the aggressive, boozy head of the station with a dubious, possibly criminal past, and Jack, the dog. Five traumatized souls removed from society, who, in the solitude of the seemingly paradisiacal, hostile nature of the Arctic, try to deal with themselves, the absence of civilization, their human needs and shortcomings, and to master their lives.

Georg Stefan Troller, born in Vienna in 1921, crossed half of Europe as a refugee only to return with the US army in 1945 . As a filmmaker he became a chronicler of his time and with this film he engages in some bold and self-ironic navel gazing.

Monday demonstrations against Hartz IV, labor disputes, highway blockades against tuition fees. It is primarily anger that drives people onto the streets: anger at the shameless enrichment of "those at the top" and ever-increasing cutbacks "at the bottom." Behind this anger often lies sheer fear. The fear of falling into social decline for good. And a feeling of powerlessness.

Four young artists: Bodo (18) is a piano player, Rasmus (21) an actor, Jessica (21) a painter, Patrick (18) a rapper. The documentary gives us an insight into their every-day lives as well as their creative process.

Some concerts are important simply as occasions: The “Joint Concert Tel Aviv” was a celebration of reconciliation, a performance shared by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra that would have been inconceivable a few years earlier. Zubin Mehta takes a massive band consisting of both orchestras through performances of Ben Haim’s fascinating “Psalm”, Ravel’s “La Valse” and Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony”.

German director Werner Schroeter invited his favourite opera singers to a 13th century abbey near Paris. There was no pre-planned action. There was no script, no continuity. On the other hand, there were precise constraints that provided the rules of the game: the setting, the Abbey of Royaumont, and the chosen participants. Each singer came accompanied by a person of his or her choice, and worked on an aria chosen by the director.

Designed primarily for non-Turkish viewers, Tolda Örnek's documentary has a portentous narration by Sir Donald Sinden, focusing mostly on Atatürk's qualities as a leader as well as an inspiration to others. His shortcomings (drinking and smoking too much, as well as an inability to relate to his wife) are not overlooked, but Örnek suggests that they were chiefly due to his obsession with work. He had a lot to do in a very short time and achieved it.

Songbirds are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Messenger is a visually thrilling ode to the beauty and importance of the imperiled songbird, and what it means to all of us on both a global and human level if we lose them.

There are landscapes that hardly anyone has entered or seen: this film takes the viewer through New Zealand from the southern edge to the northernmost tip. High-quality images from the air, on land and in the water bring paradise to the other end of the world.

Documentary about the German sex industry after the German reunification.

An allegorical documentary about the workers of the world, whose common destinies and hopes for peace are symbolically united by the rivers that run through their respective lands. The film was shot on the Volga, the Mississippi, the Nile, the Yangtze, the Amazon and the Ganges and combines these images of five continents with the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and the poetry of both Bertolt Brecht and Paul Robeson.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump — one the President of the United States, the other the President of Russia. Two men at the pinnacle of global power whose relationship keeps the world on edge. One a former businessman, the other a former KGB agent. Both have been active in politics for years. What drives them? The struggle over a possible ceasefire — or even peace — in Ukraine brought the two together last summer in Anchorage. But the question remains: who wants what? And who is succeeding with what agenda?

For the USA, World War 2 was an all-out war - to mobilize the masses, the US government launched a huge propaganda campaign and cinema, the medium of the masses, was quite simply their most important weapon. Government authorities monitored the production of feature films and the military itself produced documentaries aimed at rallying the American people to support the troops. This film tells the story of four Hollywood directors of European origin, who returned to the "Old World" during the Second World War to make propaganda documentaries for the US Army at the front: William Wyler from Alsace, Frank Capra from Italy, Anatole Litvak from Ukraine and - in post-war Germany - Billy Wilder from Austria.

Pina Bausch created and performed Café Müller for her dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal. The dance was inspired by and based on her childhood memories of watching her father work at his café in Germany during and immediately following World War II. In this silent style featurette, Bausch shows a restaurant after closing, in which the ghosts of the departed customers stumble blindly into walls and onto chairs but fail to find one another.

No continent hosts as many different environments and landscapes as Africa. From wide savannahs, resting gently on vast desert dunes, to dense rainforest, bordering the equator. See how many tribes, such as the Massai in the savannah, have kept their traditional way of life to this day and watch how animals have had to adapt their behaviors in order to survive. Join us on a magical journey through the history and culture of mankind. Join us on a journey through Africa!