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Political intervention by Günter Wallraff.

Sometimes Hannelore wishes she were a Hans, because “when a woman has to deal with a lot of men, she has to summon up a lot of strength to be heard”. The mayor of the island of Ummanz off Rügen used to be a cook. Now she represents the government and demonstrates “socialist democracy in action”. Director Róza Berger-Fiedler weaves Madam Mayor’s encounters with her constituency and discussions about the office with all its responsibilities into a sensitive portrait of a dedicated person.

Sibylle Schönemann’s film about abortion lets young and older women speak; women who were forced to abort by their partners or who chose to carry the baby to term despite predicted difficulties. Assembled as a kind of collage, a round table alternates with stylised passages, while the camera also shows moments in a clinic right before and after the procedure. The attitude vacillates between drama and affirmation of life. Liberal perspectives, with one exception, are left out. Schönemann, together with Tamara Trampe, almost managed to take up the complex issue in a feature film.

This film subtly contrasts banal reality with parody, using technical film techniques like time lapse and color filtering to parallel a home theater screening with a seduction scene. The director skillfully stimulates the viewer’s erotic imagination in a delicate and ironic manner, while also incorporating amateur film flaws dramaturgically and adding a socially critical, satirical element.

DEFA documentary about various summer workers in Siberia.

Germany, during the Weimar Republic. In November 1929, traveling salesman Kurt Erich Tetzner is buried at Leipzig's South Cemetery, with his widow in deep mourning. Just three days earlier, Tetzner had burned to death in his car in a mysterious accident near Regensburg. But during the autopsy, forensic pathologist Prof. Kockel begins to have doubts...

When twin brothers Georg and Steffen look a little too deeply into their glasses one day, they decide to swap roles for 14 days. Georg is the manager of a large department store and Steffen is a writer. The two experience bizarre situations: The department store director is adored by a saleswoman with a passion for literature and has to report on his literary work as the guest of honor at a brigade meeting. He is also short of ideas for the lively stories he is supposed to write. The writer, on the other hand, is not very familiar with the bureaucratic customs of running a department store. He allows all the sales assistants to take their housekeeping day at once, approves 3,000 marks for decoration purposes and approves of all departments of the department store being open until 8pm.

Episodic film based on the book by and starring Friedrich Torberg.

The Marriage of Figaro that received its premiere on 26 February 1975 in the Komische Oper Berlin was Walter Felsenstein’s last production and in many respects can be regarded as representing his legacy. Having just returned from directing a guest production at Vienna’s Burgtheater, Felsenstein had been working on Figaro since early February 1974. He had already directed three productions of the work – in 1934 in Cologne, in 1942 at the Salzburg Festival and in 1950 at the Komische Oper.

One evening, Lee Warren visits Richard Fenton, the lawyer with whom his wife is cheating on him. Warren tells Fenton that he intends to kill him, but gives him a chance: he agrees to let him live if he discovers even the slightest flaw in Warren's perfect murder plan ...

A comedy directed by Rudolf Lubowski.

The nightclub "Zum Klabautermann" in St. Pauli is a cheerful place where people like to meet. Every evening, when the two bargemen wrap the guests in sailor's yarn as supposed sailors on a long voyage and Lotti, known as "Das laufende Glück", knits the clientele, things get very lively. Can landlady Hermine prevent a competitor from poaching her "artistic" staff...?

An attempt at a psychological profile of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who answers the author's questions about his artistic and personal development in a manner that is at times shockingly laconic. Excerpts from his film "Beware of a Holy Whore" document how much the life circumstances of his group of actors influenced the work of the director.

A young woman inherits a massive industrial empire that starts a feud with her relatives.

A company management tries to use religion as an instrument of adaptation.

A 30-year-old returns to his hometown after several years away, where he is confronted with childhood memories, especially feelings of hatred towards his father.

The courtship behavior of Great Bustards is studied. The male Great Bustard is considerably larger than the female. This impression is reinforced during courtship when the male dances in front of the female, showing the light undersides of its wings and inflating its throat pouch.

Early Rosa von Praunheim short film. Originally intended to be the ending of "Die Bettwurst".

An experimental biopic that explores the life of Swiss writer Robert Walser. The film deliberately avoids a linear narrative structure and approaches Walser more in the form of a poetic meditation on the life of a poet. Walser is portrayed as a role model for the film's author, who has radically distanced himself from or rejected the grammar and rhetoric of conventional film more than his colleagues.

Short film about a bicyclist from West Germany.

Documents the 1974 Giro d'Italia, from the Pope's blessing of the riders to the record-tying finish.

The minutes before the train departs: time pauses.

UNREACHABLE HOMELESS is particularly lost on the eye, at times changing color, focal length, or focus with every other frame. Its staccato rhythms are not unlike those of Paul Sharit's flicker films, though the use of continually recognizable imagery creates compelling effects within the picture's deep space as well. Wyborny's shots are brief but filled with interior motion. He varies his exposure so that background areas suddenly materialize, or uses single framing to scurry occasional cars or barges across the screen.

A Low German comedy performed by an amateur theater group, in which suitcases are mixed up. It is linked to a frame story about the making of the film.

The film focuses on the role played by the parental home and vocational school alongside the training center in the life of an apprentice.

Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg: Children are playing and climbing all over the monument to Käthe Kollwitz, frowning adults are watching them. What would Gustav Seitz, the creator of the sculpture, say? Christa Mühl has asked him but reveals his answer only when the adults have finally disappeared. Until then, she constructs explosive matter as light as a feather, set to Belgian cembalo jazz and with the perky montage style that characterises her early documentary work. After Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler himself had the most controversial scene cut, the film could be broadcast on television and triggered a lively discussion about the practical value of art.

In Düsseldorf-based filmmaker Lutz Mommartz’s Das Atem des Schafes (The Breath of the Sheep, 1970) we see Scotland as an outsider. Recorded on a trip to the Highlands ahead of his participation in Strategy: Get Arts – a landmark exhibition at Edinburgh College of Art – Mommartz’s 8mm film testifies to the Scottish imaginary that preceded self-representation. Mist-wrapped mountains and a maggot-infested sheep carcass are soundtracked by stretched-out psychedelia, encoding this as a place of wildness." - Marcus Jack 8mm - b/w

August 24, 1937: a day in the life of expressionist sculptor and author Ernst Barlach (Fred Düren). Barlach lives in the small town of Güstrow, keeping to himself and wanting to steer clear of politics. On this day he learns that the Nazis have dragged his famous 1927 sculpture The Hovering Angel out of the Güstrow Cathedral. Barlach begins to reflect on his life of “inner emigration” and on his work.

A short directed by Michael Bückner.

Aguirre, a Spanish father, left his family to work as a sewer worker in Germany. His son joined and he does hire. One day, the boy dies in an accident as well as German sewer worker who tries to save him. Aguirre tries to reach out to his widow and children who turn away. He understands that it is because he is a foreign worker and they reproach him as a foreigner, to be the cause of death of the German sewage worker. The universe Aguirre then collapses.

The great, increasing intensity of the film results from an interaction of the actress and camera not yet attempted in this way. The phases of emotions of a life lived through in a few minutes - the theme that the film has posed - are completely expressed. Time-lapse and delay immediately express the external process, the performer adequately succeeds in demonstrating the internal processes. Interesting are the nuances with which the color scheme follows the development of the idea. This applies here in a special way also from the acoustic processing.