An increasing number of people in Germany no longer want anything to do with their state. A mixture of idiosyncrats and anti-system activists are turning their backs on the Federal Republic. How did the "Reichsbürger" movement become radical? What are their motives? What emerges is a European community of anarchists, businessmen, esotericists and adventurers - between a self-declared fight for freedom and obstinacy.
An increasing number of people in Germany no longer want anything to do with their state. A mixture of idiosyncrats and anti-system activists are turning their backs on the Federal Republic. How did the "Reichsbürger" movement become radical? What are their motives? What emerges is a European community of anarchists, businessmen, esotericists and adventurers - between a self-declared fight for freedom and obstinacy.
2017-12-13
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In the months and years following the end of the World War Two, Allied forces faced a series of bombings and attacks in occupied Germany. Nazi loyalists attempted to derail the rebuilding process by killing any Germans collaborating with the enemy. And the mysterious SS-Werewolves underground organization boasted of the coming rebirth of the Party.
Christof Wackernagel, best known in Germany as an actor and former member of the Red Army Faction ("RAF") lives in Mali. In his compelling portrait, Jonas Grosch shows a man who simply cannot stand still if he senses injustice. The courage to stand up for one’s beliefs coupled with vanity? However one chooses to look at it, it is easy to imagine what made him connect with the "RAF". With his irrepressible will for freedom, Christof Wackernagel gets entangled in the horrors of day-to-day life in Africa.
By means of objects, photos, tapes and films, director Angelika Levi, half-German, half-Jewish, examines the story of her family. The film deals with trauma and the way history is produced, filed away, turned into discourse and ordered on macro and micro levels.
In World War II. African-American GIs liberate Germany from Nazi rule while racism prevailed in their own army and home country. Returning home they continue fighting for their own rights in the civil rights movement.
An unusual friendship in an agitated political context.
A film essay investigating the question of what “the West” means beyond the cardinal direction: a model of society inscribed itself in the Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar history and architecture. The narrator shifts among reflections on modern architecture and property relations, detailed scenes from childhood, and a passed-down memory of a “hemmed-in West Germany,” recalling the years of her parents’ membership in a 1970s communist splinter group.
From the inner workings of the RAF. Former RAF-member Peter-Jürgen Boock reveal the many secrets and myths about the Baader-Meinhof gang a.k.a. RAF - Rote Armee Fraktion.
A documentary of the German national soccer team’s 2006 World Cup experience that changed the face of modern Germany.
Where daily practices become ritual, repetitive, looped, and sequenced. A transatlantic, experimental Hip-Hop collaboration between Germany & Cuba
Knots and Fields examines the aesthetic debates and tensions that have animated the Darmstadt courses over six decades, exploring their relevance today in an increasingly globalised environment.
How did Nazi Germany, from limited natural resources, mass unemployment, little money and a damaged industry, manage to unfurl the cataclysm of World War Two and come to occupy a large part of the European continent? Based on recent historical works of and interviews with Adam Tooze, Richard Overy, Frank Bajohr and Marie-Bénédicte Vincent, and drawing on rare archival material.
Nazi propaganda film about the Condor Legion, a unit of German "volunteers" who fought in the Spanish Civil War on the side of eventual dictator Francisco Franco against the elected government of Spain.
Italy, founder of fascism, still tolerates its sympathies. Is its government allowing the past to live on? With the far-right set to gain in European elections, is the extreme becoming mainstream?
Germany in Autumn does not have a plot per se; it mixes documentary footage, along with standard movie scenes, to give the audience the mood of Germany during the late 1970s. The movie covers the two month time period during 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped, and later murdered, by the left-wing terrorists known as the RAF-Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction). The businessman had been kidnapped in an effort to secure the release of the orginal leaders of the RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. When the kidnapping effort and a plane hijacking effort failed, the three most prominent leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, all committed suicide in prison. It has become an article of faith within the left-wing community that these three were actually murdered by the state.
On June 1st, 2019, around 11:30pm, the shoot which represents a turning point in the federal republic falls. In the hessian small town Wolfhagen-Istha, the district president of Kassel, Walter Lübcke, is murdered during this night, while, just a few meters away, the annual carnival is putting the locals into a festive mood. It is DNA-evidence on the clothes of Walter Lübcke which leads the investigators on June 15th, 2019, to his presumptive murderer: Stephan Ernst. The previously convicted right-wing extremist Ernst gets arrested by a SEK unit in Kassel. A first background check reveals: Stephan Ernst was known to the security authorities, but they did not have him on their radar for six years. Now he is back. And a person is dead. The docu-drama “Schuss in der Nacht” („Shoot in the dark“) tells emotionally, and simultaneously factually, how the deadly attack on Lübcke came to be. It tells about the first far-right motivated murder of a politician since the era of national socialism.
Henry Ford, the legendary automobile manufacturer, James D. Mooney, the GM manager and Tom Watson, the IBM boss, were all awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazis' highest distinction for foreigners, by Hitler for their services to the Third Reich. At this time, in 1937 and 1938, Hitler's armaments industry was running at full speed. The German subsidiaries of these American companies - Opel, the Ford Werke AG and Dehomag - had willingly allowed themselves to be integrated into the "Führer's" war preparations. The film concentrates on the companies which were indispensable for Hitler to wage war. The documentary is supported by new archive material, as well as interviews with contemporary witnesses and experts.
2024 is likely to be a decisive year for Sahra Wagenknecht's political future. In the arena of power, she might assume a role that she is already very familiar with. In the early years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sahra Wagenknecht became the "most famous face" of the PDS, the successor party to the SED. Yet, even as the youngest member of the party's executive board, she was considered a "disruptive factor." She is unyielding and swims against the tide. Sahra Wagenknecht does not distance herself from Stalinism, nor from the Berlin Wall, and wishes for a reformed GDR.