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The titular guesthouse no longer exists today. The building has remained, but for almost half a century it has had a different owner and its purpose is different. Before the war, tourists from various regions of Germany came here, in 1945 the vicinity of the guesthouse became the "Regained Territories", to which repatriates from the east began arriving. One of them was an inhabitant of Lviv who spent several years in a Soviet labor camp. After the war, he moved to a former German guesthouse. The action of the film takes place today. The son of the former owners, who was 12 years old at the outbreak of the war, comes to the town where the guesthouse was located. There is an unusual meeting of two aging men who, against their will, have been torn from their places of grew up and spend their entire lives away from their homeland.

Berlin scenery, intercut with scenes of Broodthaers smoking, reading, eating and daydreaming.

Banka is the son of Ben Bal. Balkan is his brother. Kankan is their maid. They are all cannibals. But Banka loves Nil... The story is about the introduction of portable television. Everyone is everyone else's enemy, but in the houses where the electronic ghosts wreak their stationary havoc, there is human emotion.

A documentary film about a "village of huts" that was erected in a section of forest near Frankfurt am Main in 1980 to demonstrate against the planned construction of Runway West. It was built by a large number of Frankfurt citizens together with various citizens' movements.

Brief portrait of several construction sites.

We were slightly feverish when we started working with a particular color process. At the development, we had obtained wonderful tones of blue and yellow as well as colored solarizations. Thus, this process was used for 15 days then the fever subsided. At that time they listened to the music of Gilbert and Lewis, and that is why they put a piece on the soundtrack.

The story of the Argentine tango star Carlos Gardel is retold in a (computer graphic) theater in which his 1935 movie is projected. If the tango is "a sad thought one can dance," then we are offered the spectacle of romance as compensation. The battle of the Marne and the cooling towers of an atomic plant provide the context of the desire for "a new beginning." "At last, at last" lovers clinch and "FIN" appears on black. Gardel was killed in a plane crash about the time his film was released. The appearance of Valentino among the enormous crowds at Gardel's funeral is a reminder of what depths of emotion were attached to a similar personage, not so foreign and obscure to us.

It's time to upgrade: In a utopian model landscape, trains loaded with tanks travel from left to right, from right to left—from west to east, from east to west. Four-year-old Nini comments on the hustle and bustle.

David Bowie and Montgomery Clift are objects of playful identification, cocktails are called Long Island or Manhattan, club cigarettes lie next to dollar bills, and the first push-button phones invite you to engage in phone sex.

Short film by SCHMELZDAHIN

The peasants of Cap Vert, women and young girls, practically always left to themselves, since husbands and fathers leave the country in order to find work, know how to face up to everyday life and difficulties with a smile.

The performers imitate a world of work, entertainment, and emotions, as well as its language. In doing so, they create a new world composed of an unmanageable number of patterns and stereotypes.

In his last reportage shortly before his death, the 'roving reporter' Egon Erwin Kisch followed the traces of Karl Marx's stays at the spa with loving nostalgia. But this short film, shot in the mid-1980s, could not ignore the discrepancy between the teachings of the 'great socialist' and their realization!

The tape is a video collage of models and lighting effects. The models are based on Ancient Egyptian culture and its mythological figures, staged as tableaux: «Anubis-Charon-Tableau», «Isis and Osiris-Tableau» and «Horus-Tableau». The single scenes are acted out using paper models of the figures and mythological objects. Different scales of light and shade form the background and help to evoke thematic atmospheres such as «The Air under the Wings», «Circling Night» or «The Black Shadow».

Experimental short film

Wittstock an der Dosse is located in the German state Mark Brandenburg, apx. 90 kilometers from Berlin. Since 1974 Volker Koepp visited the town several times to examine life of the female workers in the textile industry. He interviewed them about their work, spare-time, thoughts and feelings. Three of them were questioned repeatedly for a long-time overview. This is the outcome of 10 years of Koepp's work. Written by Tom Zoerner

The film follows in the footsteps of Elvira Hagelstein, a worker from Altona. After imprisonment and torture under the Nazis, she flees to Spain, where she fights in the civil war and rescues many orphans. She later moves to Peru, where she campaigns for political refugees until her death.

Michael Brynntrup’s first 8mm feature: an autobiographical travel diary made in Italy (1981) in which the young filmmaker films his own journey and mounting self‑awareness - his coming‑out, identity search and flight from Germany.

The last few years of collaboration with Schmelzdahin were mainly devoted to the chemical processes during and after the development of the film material. This led to a number of very interesting phenomena such as: shifting of the color balance within individual layers of color, etc.

Documentary about Curt Goetz.

In this film, Róza Berger-Fiedler traces the history of the Jews in Berlin from the Middle Ages to the present day and connects it with his own biography.

The film documents the 80 days of chaos in Hannover, including photographs in black and white of clashes between punks and neo-nazi skinheads. In addition, it presents music videos of Hannover punk bands like Blut + Eisen, Boskops, Schwarz-Rotes Banner and Fortschreitende Angstzustände.

Jochen Hick talks about an aging gay masseur and the times before AIDS.

Documentary by Eckhart Schmidt about New Wave music.

A film about various aspects of how humans interact with water, using Germany as an example. The contradictions that were already apparent at that time were scarcity, pollution, and privatization, but also soil sealing.

Far removed from the officially propagated GDR cultural sector, Christine Schlegel created her very own energetic cosmos on 8mm stock between 1977 and 1986. She painted over or scratched lines and shapes on footage of the dancer Fine Kwiatkowski. She projected painted footage on the dancing body during live performances, enveloping and re-shaping it.

A study of the economic relationship between developing countries and industrialized nations, developed using the example of an agricultural cooperative in Upper Volta. Beans are grown on huge monocultures for the European market, largely displacing the cultivation of urgently needed staple foods. The critical essence of the film is largely weakened by confusing dramatic effects and overly simplistic symbolism.

In Parasympathica the artist divides her body into two halves, one black and the other white, with everything held together by a crown she wears. This "split" figure rotates jerkily by means of single frame animation. As Mattuschka spins on her own axis in a movement resembling a butterfly, the contrasts between the two divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, are blurred.

13.06.1988

Short film based on a story by Fakir Baykurt.

Wuppertal is a drizzly, industrial city on the Rhine and one immediately wonders why Pina Bausch and her avant-garde dance troupe have settled there. A socially engaged documentarian, Wildenhahn is also perplexed by this issue and spends considerable time trying to place Bausch in a context outside of the aesthetic. Still, the dance company's daily life and the excruciating rehearsal and performance schedule is solidly captured. The film begins cleverly: a dance critic offers sagacious comments on ballet dancers finishing their careers at mid-thirty just when, according to Bausch, the "aspects of misery, suffering and fear of death should become an integral part of a dancer's spiritual and psychological make-up." Wildenhahn's camera glides over the dancers' bodies as Bausch leads them through their paces, a consummate teacher. Leaving behind rehearsals of "Bandoneón" and "Walzer," Wildenhahn then ventures out into the streets of Wuppertal searching for the dance of the common people.

In early 1971, the first squatting occupation took place in Berlin-Kreuzberg, carried out by 74 young people who wanted to create their own living spaces in an empty building. The Georg-von-Rauch-Haus and its occupation served as a catalyst for further actions across Germany. The documentary tells the stories of 13 young squatters from “the very beginning” and traces their life paths after they left the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus.

A documentary about author Henri-Pierre Roché and the real-life relationships that inspired the novel and Francois Truffaut's 1962 film "Jules and Jim."

Documentary about a woman writer.

Animated short film

“With this film I try to retrace my journey, my story through the ruins, neighbourhoods, and streets of Berlin. I filmed the dialogue that took place between the city and myself, the wanderings in the old neighbourhoods (Moabit, Kreuzberg, Wedding), places where you can still find most of the traces of the past, or rather what’s left of them.” (AL)

While Pina Bausch was preparing her film The Plaint of the Empress in 1987, the French, British and German co-producers were waiting for a script. No script: no film. That is how the film industry saw things.The discussions dragged on but eventually the TV stations accepted the idea of shooting the film without a script. Someone had the idea of making a "test film" showing what the results of working in Pina Bausch's way could be. That's how this film was born - a documentary on the rehearsals for AHNEN, a piece she was developing at the time. For twenty five years the film stayed in the archives; today it emerges as an extraordinary document. This is how Pina Bausch and her company worked. This is how this work was created, that touched so many people continous to do so today.

“Everyone says fat people eat too much. But it’s not that simple”, Christiane Hein states at the beginning of her film which follows seven-year-old Robert Becher from Erfurt in his struggle against excess pounds. The stages include a dieting sanatorium complete with “juice day”, humiliating physical education lessons at school and a visit to relatives in the country where Robert experiences a life without teasing and self-punishment. This is where the boy lets go – not easy when thoughts of weight fence one’s life in. Again and again, director Hein inserts scales as a symbolic image reminiscent of a guillotine-like torture instrument. A compassionate portrait.