At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.
At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.
2020-10-28
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Emma Freese is desperate when her husband Alfred falls ill at the Howaldtswerke in Kiel. How is the family supposed to get by without their wages? The war has scarred this generation, but now things are supposed to be looking up. The workers want their fair share and are fighting for an income that also gives them room to live. In October 1956, 34,000 metalworkers in the shipyards and factories of Schleswig-Holstein walk off the job to fight for justice and their dignity. This strike is still regarded as the toughest and longest in Germany. Employers and politicians stand in the strikers' way.
„I began documenting their lives, if only because I hoped each film would have a happy ending.“ (Gerd Kroske)
The film is a reportage showing the help of workers from the GDR in the industrial reconstruction of Syria. We witness the friendly relationship between workers from both countries, who are jointly involved in the construction of the cotton spinning mill in Homs. In impressive pictures the exoticism of the environment and the mentality of the Syrian hosts is shown. At the same time it becomes clear that the workers from the GDR become 'ambassadors of the GDR' through their collegial behaviour and good work.
This first co-production between the GDR and Great Britain is intended to contribute to an understanding of the situation and attitudes of millions of working people in opposing social orders. Using the example of shipyard workers, fishermen, the brigade and family of a trade union active cook and unemployed person of various ages and professions in Newcastle on the one hand and a brigade of crane operators of the Warnowwerft and fishermen of the Warnemünde cooperative on the other hand, insights into the way of life and attitudes of people of our time are to be conveyed.
Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin in 1950.
In 1946, just after the end of World War II, a secret organization of Holocaust survivors plans a terrible revenge: since the Nazis have killed millions of Jews, they will kill millions of Germans.
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.)
In 1981, a film about the misadventures of a German U-boat crew in 1941 becomes a worldwide hit almost four decades after the end of the World War II. Millions of viewers worldwide make Das Boot the most internationally successful German film of all time. But due to disputes over the script, accidents on the set, and voices accusing the makers of glorifying the war, the project was many times on the verge of being cancelled.
On February 26, 1920, Robert Wiene's world-famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin. To this day, it is considered a manifesto of German expressionism; a legend of cinema and a key work to understand the nature of the Weimar Republic and the constant political turmoil in which a divided society lived after the end of the First World War.
For more than a decade, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's right-hand man during the infamous Third Reich, assembled a collection of thousands of works of art that were meticulously catalogued.
In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.
A punk documentary about the life and death of the GDR punk Dieter "Otze" Ehrlich and his band Schleimkeim aus dem Schweinestall. With the fall of the Wall, Otze loses not only his enemy images, but also his life at the price of freedom.
Documentary film with play scenes about the rise and fall of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 from the perspective of various well-known poets and writers who experienced the events as contemporary witnesses.