Discover Movies

A laborer sent into exile during the Fascist era for defending a beggar returns to his hometown after the armistice. He finds it in the throes of peasant revolts and soon becomes the leader of a gang wanted by both the Carabinieri and the Mafia.

Matteo is a Roman barber whose business is full of debts. He decides to escape from this depressing reality by accepting his sister's invitation to Brazil.

Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.

A character with a sad, "lost" look gets on a bus with a pizza in his hands. He is almost seated when the driver brakes suddenly. His pizza flies out of his hands and falls to the floor.

Documentary on the Nanjing Massacre.

Every year since 1980, I have filmed the Good Friday ceremony reconstructing the Passion of Christ in Burzet, a remote village in the Ardèche area, where for seven hundred years, the local people have dressed up to celebrate and perpetuate this religious rite. (Gérard Courant)

Writer in need of money returns to his hometown to try to write a new book. But his addiction to alcohol causes strange dreams that take him 50 years back to a Mardi Gras tuesday, when he was a teenager.

Can Menahem Golan and Sam Lupowitz beat Hollywood to the screen with their ultra-low budget account of the Versace murder?

How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

"Einfach raus!" is the wish that 18-year-old Andreas has had for a long time. Simply get out of the GDR and go to the West to realize his life's dream and study physics. Suddenly, in the historic summer of 1989, his dream becomes reality. The Hungarian-Austrian border is surprisingly opened and the first refugees ask for asylum at the German embassy in Budapest. When Andreas spends his vacation with his parents at a campsite in Hungary, he takes the opportunity and tries to escape to the west at night and in fog.

A Czech woman is kidnapped in Berlin and forced into prostitution. The man behind the kidnapping is a respected businessman. He is on the wanted list, but so far nothing has been proven against him. This changes when a young female detective becomes involved in the investigation.

This is A Documentary of Diego Maradona

Ana, a former member of the Basque terrorist group ETA who lives in a small village near the Portuguese border working as a veterinarian and sharing her days with her partner Darío and their daughter Amalia, meets José, an attractive man who participated in the dirty anti-terrorist war against ETA criminals who took refuge in France.

A day in the life of an eleven-year-old boy, Ali, who has to take care of his mother, who's in need of antidepressants.

Tintin and Captain Haddock travel to Tibet in search of an old friend who has disappeared after a plane crash.

At his cinema in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, Nanni Moretti anxiously oversees preparations for the premiere of the film Close-up, by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Meanwhile Disney's The Lion King is taking Italy by storm.

An account of the events that led a young tourist to permanent silence, after taking shelter with a peasant family whose dog he helped to exterminate.

Amelia cannot bear to see her beloved grandmother suffering in a care home. She wants to give her one last Christmas in her old surroundings, but the old lady’s house has long since been let to someone else. She takes advantage of the residents’ absence to organise the Christmas celebrations, but is caught off guard by their return.

A documentary on the entire works of the Italian sculptor Michelangelo Pistoletto who lives in Vienna. His mirror-images make him one of the most original, manifold personalities in the European art scene.

Amidst the thaw of glasnost, the Kremlin discovers that two Soviet agents, sent to England under deep cover in 1965, have been “lost.” A beautiful and ambitious Russian agent, sent to London to track them down, becomes embroiled in a tangle of CIA, KGB and MI-5 plots and counterplots as the two lost agents, now utterly assimilated, try to avoid detection.

In the near future, the areas between major cities are lawless wastelands. Atolladero is a town run with an iron fist by a corrupt tyrant named The Judge and his murderous enforcer, Madden. One decent cop decides to leave town, but the powers that be don't want that and go after him.

The Blue Villa is a seedy bordello on a Mediterranean island where the villages are frightened by the ghost-like return of a young man, who mysteriously disappeared after the killing of a young Eurasian woman.

A young King Arthur is awoken from his sleep by bad dreams, about a boy who is made king because he pulls a sword from a stone. He goes to Merlin to seek his counsel, and Merlin begins a story of his own, about a young boy with strange abilities and visions. The boy, called Emrys, is feared in his village called of as a demon. Eventually, King Vortigern comes and forces his village to build a tower for him. However, the tower crumbles. His wizards advise him to find a demon boy and spill his blood upon the ground. However, when the boy is brought before Vortigern, he predicts that there is a pool of water beneath the foundations of the castle that weaken it. The workers find a pool of water and two strange stones, from which two beasts emerge, a white and a red dragon.

A group of people is having a barbecue party when two Krishnas appear at their doorstep, both of which transform into hideous monsters and start killing everybody in gory ways. The survivors retreat to a friend's house and realize something bigger is going on...

A portrait of the young generation in Germany during the 1990s, denying a stereotyping from the outside.

Short film by Teo Hernández.

The hero of this play, Liane Jokkemöller, runs a Cologne travel agency that specialises in adventure travels: her desk is sitting on elephant legs, the walls are papered with zebra stripes. The dernier cri are weekend safaris to Africa, including a photo-op with Tarzan and Jane. Gerhard and Christel Pfuscher, sexshop-owners from Bergheim, splash out and spend a small fortune on it. But then there is word of the jungle heroes getting run over by a herd of elephants, and the travel agency owner is in a fix. With her husband Harald, zookeeper in the monkey house, she travels to Africa to don the leopard fur herself for once. But at first, Liane must help Harald in return by riding the killer whale in the zoo’s aquarium. Finally, in the jungle, things are going crazy. Starzahn has to decide between two women, for cleaning lady Eloise Pütz is also in on it. A haunting of the jungle ghost, a frenzy of the instincts.

Mathilde (Dominique Blanc) has had a number of children, but is still an attractive woman. One day her husband simply picks up and leaves without any explanation whatever. At about the same time, she is involved at an accident at her workplace which makes her strongly aware of the passage of time. Can she once more know the love of a man? She has enough suitors: Charlie, though dull, has been in love with her since she could remember; Jacques is the father of one of her children; Mano has moved to the north of France from Spain, and wants to refurbish her house for her. Without rushing, she carefully considers each man (and her absent husband) in the context of her life, what she wants from it, and what is possible.

Short film. Premise and duration unknown.

Several young girls were killed in a rural area. Thus Inspector Matthaei has to travel to the region where it happened and has to search for the killer. When all the people suspect a roamer to be the killer he gets lynched and everybody thinks that the crimes will stop now but not Matthaei who searches for a blond girl that looks just like the ones that were murdered. He finds one and stays with her and her mother, attracting the murderer with the girl trying to catch him this way.

Cyrano de Bergerac is in love with his young cousin, Roxane, but does not dare to confess his love to her. It must be said that Cyrano's prominent nasal appendage attracts him constant mockery, which often forces him to defend his honor with weapons. When Roxane reveals to him that she loves the handsome Christian, a cadet of Gascony like Cyrano, the latter undertakes to take him under his protection. But the young man is cruelly lacking in spirit. It is therefore Cyrano who writes love letters to Roxane in her name, in which he expresses the ardent flame he also feels for his cousin. He even helps Christian to marry his beloved in secret. It is only years later and after having been the victim of an attack that Cyrano, on the verge of death, will finally declare his passion for her.

A bomb blows up in Milan and five people die. After only three hours Ravida, the chief of the Secret Service, knows the name of the killer and that of his chief.

Featuring plenty of two-fisted action with romantic and political overtones, this intelligent thriller from Spanish director Daniel Calparsoro is set in the Basque region of northernmost Spain and centers on the clash between two Basque terrorists whose relationship becomes strained when the female starts refusing to kill their enemies. Unfortunately, for someone like her, leaving terrorism can be as dangerous as remaining in the fray.

Experimental art / moving image film by Tony Donoghue.

Comedy drama about John Croft (Neil Morrissey), a failed businessman who is heavily in debt when he finds a wallet which contains a map which he later finds could lead him to hidden treasure. He decides to search for the treasure alone, but Roland Blood (Jim Carter), a dealer in naval antiquities, is not far behind. Croft follows the clues on the map from a castle to a church to a seaside promotory and finds the spot where the treasure was buried is the site of a new beachside housing development. He tries to buy the house, but his bank manager does not look kindly on his proposal and his wife is about to discover that he re-mortgaged her home. He decides to take drastic action…

Miguel and Aurelio are two film writers who decide to lock in a monastery in Aragon to finish the script for a movie. Strolling through the beautiful neighborhood, they meet a young and very attractive baker, with whom they maintain a loving relationship and she becomes, without realizing it, the protagonist of the script.

Cheeky Jim Davidson delivers a typically controversial, politically incorrect comedy routine for a celebrity audience.

Frank, a perpetual loser from the "milieu", runs over a pedestrian during an argument with his lover Sabine and commits a hit-and-run. A petty criminal and friend of the dead man, to whom he has confessed his crime, hires him as a "bill collector" and charges him with a murder he committed himself.

A documentary covering the years Luis Buñuel spent in Mexico making films.

The hero is an astronaut who has fallen from the heavens; afflicted by nightmares, he vegetates in his hospital room until an aged, sexless humanity needs him again...

By 1941, Adolf Hitler had taken personal command of the German military apparatus. His initial successes made this seem like a good idea at the time, but by 1944, after an unparalleled series of military defeats that Hitler refused even to acknowledge, a group of high-ranking military and political figures in Germany decided to assassinate him and take over the government. Unfortunately for them, their assassination attempt failed, and the knives were out to find all the people involved in the attempt. The most wanted person in the coup was Carl Goerdeler (Dieter Schaad), a respected figure in German public life for many decades. Twenty years earlier, a girl by the name of Helene Schwärzel (Katherina Thalbach) met Goerdeler. After the coup attempt, during the nationwide manhunt, Helene recognized him and notified the authorities. In addition to receiving a huge reward, she became the focus of a nationwide propaganda campaign, and was widely resented for her "success."

Documentary covering Jim McLean's 21 years as manager of Dundee United

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture.

Former UNIT luminary Liz Shaw and her assistant Bayliss are investigating a series of bizarre murders, all committed near a soon-to-be-closed psychiatric hospital. When the hospital is unexpectedly reprieved by rich Industrialist Peter Russell events seem to move out of Liz's control. Are the incumbent director of the clinic, Doctor Dove and his predecessor Doctor O'Kane harboring the killer? What is the centuries-old horror hidden in the grounds? And what exactly is the secret of room zero?

In the summer of 1995, as every year, the patients and staff of "La Borde" psychiatric clinic rehearse their summer play for a performance on August 15th. The film records the ups and downs of the venture as rehearsals go by. Yet, it also delicately captures the day-to-day existence, the seemingly insignificant details, the loneliness and the fatigue but also the collective joy and the close attention that all these people pay to each other.

This live recording was culled from seven September 1992 concerts given in Vienna, Berlin, and Frankfurt by the Ensemble Modern, a Frankfurt-based chamber orchestra that performs only contemporary music. Composed and conducted by Frank Zappa.