Discoveries from Germany World Cinema

Siegfried of Xanten snatches the Nibelung treasure from the king of the underworld and slays the dragon Fafnir, whose blood makes him invulnerable. Siegfried falls in love with Kriemhild, the sister of the Burgundian king. But only if Siegfried helps Gunther marry Brunhild will he be allowed to marry Kriemhild. He fulfills this condition, but the two women bring ruin upon Xanten and Burgundy...

Johannes, a doctor of physics, travels with his doctoral supervisor to a scientific congress in the Alps. A series of mysterious incidents occur on site. He meets Karin, a mysterious jazz pianist who seems to know more about him than she can know. Suddenly, mysterious deaths begin to pile up and Johannes tries to uncover the secret under the mountain.

One day, driving aimlessly around the outskirts of town after a trivial domestic quarrel, a writer named Tomas accidentally hits and kills a child. Will he be able to move on?

In Los Angeles, Dr. Sarah Hathaway hired private eyes trying to find her missing son, the painter Thomas, who ran away from their home ten years ago after a quarrel with her. She finds a clue in a catalog of a panting exhibition in San Petersburg and she decides to travel alone to Russia to search for Thomas. Once there, she is not able to locate him and she has a nervous breakdown, but with the support of Dr. Ivan and helped by a street boy, she discloses what happened with her son.

In 1700s Austria, a witch-hunter's apprentice has doubts about the righteousness of witch-hunting when he witnesses the brutality, the injustice, the falsehood, the torture and the arbitrary killing that go with the job.

When a former racer faces the prospect of his car repair shop and go-kart track being foreclosed, he comes up with a daring plan: to win the prize for the big race on the Bilster Berg. He has one month to turn his old Opel into a rocket from the old days, but his ex-wife suddenly enters his life with a request to take care of their son.

Ostend, Belgium. In a decadent seaside hotel, Stefan and Valerie, a newlywed couple, meet the mysterious Countess Báthory and Ilona, her secretary.

Overwhelmed when a figure from her past reemerges, Joan Verra retreats to the countryside with her son Nathan. There she experiences fragmented recollections of her past romantic encounters.

After several Catholic school pupils are murdered, a teacher who is having an affair with one of his students becomes a suspect. When other gruesome murders start occurring shortly thereafter, the teacher suspects that he may be the cause of them.

The story of CARGO takes place on rusty space-freighter KASSANDRA on its way to Station 42. The young medic LAURA is the only one awake on board while the rest of the crew lies frozen in hibernation sleep. In 4 months will Laura's shift be over.

When people literally explode from emotional overload, grief is just the beginning. A wildly surrealist charade in which a bereaved man, his friend and mother spiral through village life.

A hedonistic bachelor - he is his rich family's black sheep - falls for a suicidal mental patient.

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)

The rise and fall of Milli Vanilli, a studio group assembled by German producer Frank Farian and fronted by nightclub dancers Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan. After a string of worldwide hit singles, awards and performances, it was revealed that the duo never sang a note of their songs, leading to one of the biggest scandals in music history.

In post-war Germany, liberation by the Allies does not mean freedom for everyone. Hans Hoffmann is repeatedly imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which criminalizes homosexuality. Nevertheless, over the decades, he continues his quest for freedom and love, even if he finds it in the most unusual places.

The adolescent Milan discovers his own suspected homosexuality at the age of 17, and the consequences for him and his family, but also the liberation as he understands why he has been so down and rebellious.

When Ruth's husband dies in New York, in 2000, she imposes strict Jewish mourning, which puzzles her children. A stranger comes to the house - Ruth's cousin - with a picture of Ruth, age 8, in Berlin, with a woman the cousin says helped Ruth escape. Hannah, Ruth's daughter engaged to a gentile, goes to Berlin to find the woman, Lena Fisher, now 90. Posing as a journalist investigating intermarriage, Hannah interviews Lena who tells the story of a week in 1943 when the Jewish husbands of Aryan women were detained in a building on Rosenstrasse. The women gather daily for word of their husbands. The film goes back and forth to tell Ruth and Lena's story. How will it affect Hannah?

A young East German woman leaves her controlling husband/business partner and relocates to a West German city to start anew as an accountant, but he soon catches up with her.

After their trip to the parallel universe, the crew of the Enterprise must determine that in the normal universe nothing is like it was. The cybernetic lifeforms of the Red Empire are there and make war against all races to eliminate all biological life.

In the heat of a shimmering Berlin summer, Nora spends her days as a third wheel to her older sister Jule and her best friend Aylin. When Romy comes onto the scene, a friendship blossoms. Nora instantly falls for her, opening up a whole new world and unexpected summer of love.

The childhood memories of writer Martín Kohan are intertwined with the unreleased archive from the Channel 9 newscast between 1973 and 1980. Through this, a key period of Argentine history is reconstructed, exploring the relationship between personal memory and the public discourse of the time

Twelve-year-old Toma is expelled from school after being relentlessly tormented by his classmates. His estranged father, Nemo, who disappeared when the boy was just two years old, invites him to their ancestral village. The locals do not embrace Nemo's unwelcome return. But he doesn't fear anyone and is determined to pass on the ancient tradition of deer hunting to his son. This fateful weekend Toma learns survival, independence, and the dark secrets of his father's past.

Best friends Toni and Paul decide to relinquish all of their belongings for 100 days, whereby they receive one of their items back on each day. During this challenge the two realize, that the only thing they cannot be without is their friendship. A story about contemporary materialism and the quest for the truly important things in life.

Michelle De Winter lives the good life, wining and dining with only the richest men who are fortunate to cross her path. Her daughter Yvette, whom Michelle insists on introducing as her 'niece', is a fashion model. She is saving herself for the right man, despite the fact that she is part of the free love generation and lives with a group of promiscuous creative types. While Michelle is searching for a new millionaire playboy, Yvette falls for the handsome Peter Von Hallstein. She asks the fatherly Dr. Fink to help her come up with a scheme to get Peter to propose to he

Arkham, 1975: Jonathan Davis' father has disappeared. His tracks lead to Germany, to the Swabian-Franconian Forest where he was stationed after the Second World War. Jonathan sets out to find him and bring him home, but deep in the woods he discovers a dark mystery from the past. Based on H.P. Lovecraft's short novel "The Colour Out of Space".

Landauer and Röwer track Maria Weinert, the ringleader of a global prostitution ring, to Malta following her escape from justice.

The last three weeks of school life have begun: After the Abitur, Germany's leaving certificate, the friends and schoolmates of Gymnasium Kerkheim (Kerkheim High) will not see each other again so soon. It is a hard time for Markus and his girl Sandra from a lower grade, as he wants to hang out with his old friends, whereas she wants him to be there for her. It's an even harder time for Dirk, who is to be expelled from school if he fails the math exam that is coming up around midday, and it is the hardest time for Michael, who is a perfect pupil, but has no fun in life at all - and doesn't even know it yet. When Steven calls out a party to celebrate his letter of exemption from the army, they all get together for one of the last real cool events ever.

Inspired by true events, Olympic swimmer Harry Melchior defects from East Germany in the 1960s and hatches a daring plot to help his sister and others flee East Berlin through a 145-yard underground tunnel.

Teenage best friends Mila, Hanna and Kati play matchmaker to their teachers while helping each other through their own budding romances.

An anarchist young woman breaks the tacit contract with civilization and fearlessly decides on a life without hypocrisy or an obligatory safety net.

When Willi's father is abducted and is only released for a valuable statue from his art collection, Tim is the only one who believes Willi that the police are on the wrong track. Together with the smart policeman's daughter Gaby and the highly intelligent outsider Karl, they start to investigate on their own. Against all odds the four discover a conspiracy. In the course of their first big detective adventure they grow together into a committed community, and so Tim, Klöschen, Karl and Gaby become the band TKKG.

A romantic drama set in 1961 that follows a young studio extra's ambitious efforts to reunite with the French girl he loves after being separated by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

The Italian driver Caruso, who usually secretly spoils the daughter of his boss, Oskar Schnell, is sent on the trip with his buddy Klaus. However, the boss doesn't suspect a bit that the two make plenty of erotic stops.

David, a waiter, finds an unpublished manuscript in a dresser drawer. To impress a girl, he claims to be the author. When the novel becomes a best-seller, the real author introduces himself and begins to take over David's life.

Napoleon, exiled, devises a plan to retake the throne. He'll swap places with commoner Eugene Lenormand, sneak into Paris, then Lenormand will reveal himself and Napoleon will regain his throne. Things don't go at all well; first, the journey proves more difficult than expected, but more disastrously, Lenormand enjoys himself too much to reveal the deception. Napoleon adjusts somewhat uneasily to the life of a commoner while waiting, while Lenormand gorges on rich food.

One Saturday, the Slurb, a strange little creature with a proboscis nose, enters Mr. Taschenbier's life. Slurb, who immediately adopts the shy Mr. Taschenbier as his "daddy," is, however, his sheer opposite: he is cheeky and chaotic and throws his well-ordered life into sheer chaos. But when Taschenbier discovers that he can fulfill all his wishes with the help of Slurb's blue freckles, his life suddenly changes. He appeases his bad-tempered landlady, Mrs. Rotkohl, and he can finally get one over on his nasty neighbor, Mr. Lürcher. Everything could be so nice if Mr. Taschenbier didn't fall in love with his pretty colleague Mrs. März and if the Slurb didn't almost burst with jealousy...

The adventures of three teenage girls - Inken, Vicky and Lena - and their quest to have their first orgasm.

After Clown Teddy lost his son, he lost his gift for laughter. He opened a joke shop and lives above the shop. His landlady has had a foster son since birth, and Teddy decides to raise the child, who always believed that Teddy was his father. When the mother suddenly appears five years later and wants her son, Teddy decides to run away with the child and goes back onstage with his son. Will the family catch up with them, or will the mother never get her son back?

Mia, 12, is spending her vacation at a lake in the Black Forest with her parents, who have been separated for years, and their new partners. While the adults try to keep things light, Mia escapes more and more often into the forest, where she meets a mysterious boy. On the morning of her birthday, Mia disappears. The fragile family structure is turned upside down and Mia's new freedom becomes increasingly dangerous.

Little Peter visits his cousin Paul on Rügen where they go with Paul's best friend Robert to a nudist beach. At first, it looks like a great day out but then Little Peter wakes on the beach and is all alone and naked! What should he do now?

A love connection clicks for Lila when she moves back to Berlin and meets Christopher -- never realizing that she's fallen for a rock star who's signed a contract to remain single for life.

Aaron had a traumatic childhood. He was constantly beaten by his mother Susanne, who repeatedly used both physical and psychological violence against him. At the age of seven, he was sexually abused by a stranger. He then began having sex with other children of the same age. Today, as a young adult, he is still traumatized and deeply ashamed. When he visits his mother again after four years of silence, he is ready to break his silence.

It's summertime and Johnny hits upon the idea of restoring a disused old bar with his old friends Benny and Bobby. Raising the capital however is a problem, but luckily the landlord's geeky daughter Polly has long harbored a crush on Bobby. Bobby wants no part of this and neither does Polly who smells a rat. As the boys work on restoring the bar, preparing for it's grand re-opening, Polly's guard softens as seemingly does Bobby's but at the expense of possible heartbreak in the unlikeliest of places....

Germany, 1968: The priest's daughters Marianna and Juliane both fight for changes in society, like making abortion legal. However their means are totally different: while Juliane's committed as a reporter, her sister joins a terroristic organization. After she's caught by the police and put into isolation jail, Juliane remains as her last connection to the rest of the world. Although she doesn't accept her sister's arguments and her boyfriend Wolfgang doesn't want her to, Juliane keeps on helping her sister. She begins to question the way her sister is treated.

A long-term couple who are in an erotic slump decide to bring a breath of fresh air into their relationship by having a ‘foursome’ with two friends. But the open-minded meeting takes an unexpected turn and ends in a fiasco.

In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.

Thomas, a father in his fifties, returns by chance to the town where he grew up. He collapses and wakes up forty years earlier in the body of his teenage self. Thrown back into his past, Thomas will not only have to re-live his first love, but also try to understand the reasons for his father’s mysterious departure. Can you change the past by living it again?

A young Kyrgyz immigrant tries to eke out a living in Moscow after abandoning her newborn and fleeing the hospital.

During the English Peasants' Revolt in 1381, a farmer becomes a leader of the rebellion against the Crown forces of a then-14-year-old King Richard II.

Helen is a nonconformist teenage girl who maintains a conflictual relationship with her parents. Hanging out most of her time with her friend Corinna, with whom she breaks one social taboo after another, she uses sex as a way to rebel and break the conventional bourgeois ethic. After an intimate shaving accident, Helen ends up in the hospital where it doesn’t take long before she makes waves. But there she finds Robin, a male nurse who will sweep her off her feet...

Claire de La Tour Picquet shares her life between her husband, the successful novelist William Brandeis, and her lover, Jacques Lalouet, William's publisher. Then she discovers that her lover has a mistress, Charlie, who is also that of her husband...

Marek starts as a trainee on a container ship. It's 197 meters long, 30 meters wide, and bound for Martinique in the Caribbean. Full of anticipation, he leaves his parents' farm in Western Pomerania in Germany and goes on board his ship at Saint-Nazaire in Brittany. Marek wants to find freedom and falls in love with the enigmatic sailor Jean. Will it just be a fling or will it last forever? Does Jean actually have a lover in every port? On his trip across the Atlantic, Marek may not actually become a sailor, but he does grow up. A romantic coming-of-age trip over the Atlantic and a maritime boy's dream about love under the conditions of modern cargo shipping.

Upon being informed that he is fatally ill with cancer, Max, who works at a used car store, steals money which his boss has gained through illegal means. When fleeing from the scene of the crime Max crashes his car. He is pulled unconscious from the destroyed vehicle by a homely young woman, Emma, who lives alone on a farm where Max decides to stay in order to hide from the police and his boss.

The breathtaking story of a man who nearly would have changed the world. In 1939, when Hitler tricked millions of people at the height of his power, radical Georg Elser — disparaged as an assassin — is one of the greatest resistance fighters.