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Drawn portraits of a man with a beard.

A trivial compilation of West German short films

Joan Tewkesbury reflects on her collaboration with Robert Altman and her first feature, Old Boyfriends (1979). This excerpt, from an unfinished working print by Katja Raganelli for the 2024 Robert Altman retrospective at the Munich Film Museum, serves as a starting point to explore her production process, how she found collaborators like Tewkesbury, her development of project ideas from these encounters, and why some projects never reached completion.

The second film begins in early April with Tarkan's return. He wanted to go back to Hamburg with the stolen 800 marks. The next night, Christian is gone. The group travels on to Lisbon to start investigating Christian's whereabouts. At the same time, school starts again. Christian has once again been caught by the police stealing a car. Three days later, he is back with the group. An educational attempt at clarification begins: Why did he run away? Why did he steal? Why the cars?

A German Film Award winning short animation.

Documentary about author Joe J. Heydecker.

The Momskys are not only messy, they also need money. Cunningly, they plan to kidnap the son of a millionaire. But their scheme doesn't exactly go according to plan.

Spring 1945, the "Greater German Reich" is crumbling in the face of imminent military defeat. In Brandenburg, not far from Berlin, four 15-year-old teenagers have discovered a food depot that has been buried by war debris. They discover a cellar full of hams, sausages, preserves and tinned food. Paradise seems to have broken out for the four of them, even before the general horror comes to an end. But Antek, one of the four boys, soon discovers a little boy who has escaped from a concentration camp and has found a hiding place right here, in the cellar, on this island of plenty, in order to survive the Nazi madness after all. His name is Abiram and he is now dependent for better or worse on the goodwill of Willi, Antek, Zick and Paule, who are almost the same age.

Wolfgang cannot make up his mind whether to choose a pretty young thing without money or a rich widow. Egon his friend advises him to choose the young girl and leads rich and ugly widow Olga to the altar himself. Now he lives in the lap of luxury, but his jealous wife never lets him out of her sight. Wolfgang takes the hen-pecked husband to the "Ball of the Piggies", where Egon promptly succumbs to the charms of an ever so sweet and sexy Piggy, those of his wife. While Olga ransacks the hotel in search of Egon the next morning, the real beneficiaries are Wolfgang and Eva who chalk up the nocturnal happenings to experience.

Documentary film about the camps in the south of France, in which Spanish civil war refugees and the volunteers of the "international brigades", non-sedentary people and Alsatian and foreign Jews were interned from 1939 onwards. Under the Vichy regime, the camps were used to intern other criminalized population groups and French Jews, who were also deported from there to extermination camps. In a mosaic of artificially framed shots, formerly interned contemporary witnesses describe their own life stories. Director Mangiante not only sheds light on the history of the camps, but also the mechanisms of personal memory.

Short film about the transformations a village experiences in the course of 40 years.

A 74-year-old man stands before the Dresden District Court. After more than forty years, the former highly decorated SS man has been brought to the scene of his crimes. The trial is the cinematic framework in which the background and mechanisms of the social system of nationalism are uncovered by tracing the social development of this SS man.

After two failed marriages, Walter is finally looking for a wife again. But his father Paul, who believes his own position in the house would be jeopardized if a daughter-in-law came into the house, cunningly gets rid of all the candidates. Walter has placed an advertisement for a wife, as both the male-headed household run by Walter's father Paul and the upbringing of his adolescent son Peter require a female hand to keep things in order. Grandfather Paul, on the other hand, feels that the cosy trinity and especially his own position in the house would be jeopardized if another daughter-in-law took over the reins. So Paul sets about inventively thwarting Walter's intentions. At first, it is completely inexplicable to Walter why all his encounters with marriageable ladies end in failure. But he has other things to worry about at the moment anyway. His son, Peter, is having an affair with his teacher's daughter, of all people.

This film is at once a self-portrait and an homage to Jean-Marie Straub, Farocki's role model and former teacher at the Film Academy.

Documentation on the Berlin S-Bahn, which threatened to fall into oblivion as a result of the division of the city.

A fisherman waits on the quay for prey. But when a fish finally bites, unusual things start to happen...

Film by Stephan Sachs.

The Robber Mathias Kneißl became a legend in Bavaria. The film is based on the historical criminal case and describes the last year of the rebel and folk hero. At the age of 23, he is released from prison, where he has served an unreasonably harsh six-year sentence. When this becomes known, he loses his job as a carpenter and now wants to emigrate to America with his girlfriend. He hopes to earn the money for the journey by committing crimes. In the process, he fatally wounds a gendarme. Despite this, Mathias Kneißl does not leave the area and stays in the Dachau hinterland. Only when his girlfriend betrays him is he able to find his hiding place. The farm was besieged by 300 police officers for days and then shot up. Kneißl was seriously injured and treated in a clinic in Munich before being beheaded in Augsburg in 1902.

This educational film cynically explores the causes and depressive effects of tourism on the physical and social environment of the Alpine region.

Teenagers at a party summon an evil spirit that possesses one of them leading to disastrous results.

"Hysteria": Introduction to the creation of the world. Harry discovers Lisa. A cigarette becomes a bone of contention and the ashes fall into the sea. "Allergy + fever": Harry and Lisa are expelled from paradise and discover the world. "An afterword, dedicated to Luis Trenker": Harald is a bohemian, Lisa works in a pastry shop.

Short film by SCHMELZDAHIN

A sexual assault and its consequences. The 2nd of three self-contained shorts from Helke Sander's series of shorts entitled From the Reports of Security Guards & Patrol Services.

Born in the year 1921, Erich Fried, the son of jewish parents, had to leave his Austrian home in 1938. He emigrated to London and became a writer. He faced the public, both in his readings and in personal discussions. His own fate (he was suffering from cancer) remained in the background. He fought for his idea "The whole world or nothing!"

A German Film Award winning documentary.

Experimental short film

A moral aunt and a poisonous civil servant want to restore order in paradise. However, paradise is not a heavenly place, but a den of iniquity that urgently needs to be cleaned up. A perfect job for Schaeppi and Mylanek.

Short Documentary by Manfred O. Jelinski

A young man lives through the end of World War II

Educational short about the Bible

In the spring of 1980, anti-nuclear activists occupied a drilling site near Gorleben and set up a "village of peace" there, consisting of homemade wooden houses and tents. The 33-day occupation was accompanied by discussions, concerts, and theater performances—and by the Wendland Film Cooperative, which documented the anti-nuclear movement from the very beginning. The "Free Republic of Wendland" was a dream that came true for a short time before several thousand police officers cleared the site. In addition to the construction and clearance, the film also shows what is at risk: the untouched landscape and the people who live there.

A former coal miner from Bottrop talks about his youth. He focuses primarily on the cinema, the radio, and television.

Computer animated short film showcasing the work of the German CGI software firm Mental Images GmbH.

Representative Diethard has given up. There is nothing left for the 40-year-old on the German marriage market. So he chooses an exotic woman from the catalog, has her flown in and marries her. But everyday life with Beanboat is disappointing...

In September 1983, a sword is forged into a ploughshare in Wittenberg. It is the most spectacular action of the peace movement in the GDR. Its initiator was the Wittenberg theologian Friedrich Schorlemmer.

Short documentary by Karl Schedereit

"This was my first student documentary. I shot it over the Easter vacation in 1980 on 16mm, black-and-white reversal film. Apart from two five-minute exercises, it was destined to be the only film I ever finished at the College of Film and Television of the German Democratic Republic (Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR, HFF) in East Germany’s Potsdam-Babelsberg. It was quickly banned from being shown publicly and it remained in storage until the end of 1989. The film tells the story of a mother and her sons having coffee and cake while they try to remember –in vain– when the first time was that they tangled with the police. The reason it was banned was the casual way the film portrayed those young men living their lives untouched by ideology, including taking their careers as petty criminals for granted, meaning the film’s author accepted their existence, as is, and simply wanted to explore it.”