Hanns Zischler

In 1949, German writer Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika embark on a road trip across a Germany in ruins, from US-dominated Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar.

During the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, eleven Israeli athletes are taken hostage and murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. In retaliation, the Israeli government recruits a group of Mossad agents to track down and execute those responsible for the attack.

In 1939, Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk flees to the United States to escape his recent past: Germany has invaded Czechoslovakia and he is now a man with no nation; because, as the Czechoslovak ambassador in London, he failed to win the support of the British and could not avert the fall of his country and the outbreak of the World War II.

Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is appalled to discover that a poison gas he helped discover is being used to kill Jews. Driven by his conscience to alert the rest of the world, Gerstein teams up with a young Jesuit priest, Riccardo Fontana, but their protestations fall on deaf ears in the Vatican.

Marco and Melanie, a young married couple, are living a life of passion, chaos, and all the little frustrations of everyday existence. Their love for each other seems like a beacon on heavy seas. But career pressure, burned toast, and dirty laundry are eroding all tenderness, and they never seem to find enough time for their six-year-old son, Benny, either. Their world is about to fall apart when Melanie moves out, taking Benny with her. She files for divorce, and Marco makes a decision that is not only going to change his own life. He suddenly discovers his own unique way of being a father … I’m the Father is a modern portrait of a generation which appears to fail its own ambitions: After all, how do you combine a job, children, love and all the other challenges of everyday life – without giving yourself up in the process? And then what happens when positions become entrenched and a divorce seems inevitable?

Tom Ripley - cool, urbane, wealthy, and murderous - lives in a villa in the Veneto with Luisa, his harpsichord-playing girlfriend. A former business associate from Berlin's underworld pays a call asking Ripley's help in killing a rival. Ripley - ever a student of human nature - initiates a game to turn a mild and innocent local picture framer into a hit man. The artisan, Jonathan Trevanny, who's dying of cancer, has a wife, young son, and little to leave them. If Ripley draws Jonathan into the game, can Ripley maintain control? Does it stop at one killing? What if Ripley develops a conscience?

A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.

The fate of a Hungarian Jewish family throughout the 20th century.

A history of the French Revolution beginning from the decision of the king to convene the Etats-Generaux in 1789 in order to deal with France's debt problem. Part one spans the event until August 10, 1792 (when the King Louis XVI lost all authority and was imprisoned). Part two carries the story through the end of the terror in 1794.

The bourgeois couple Esther and Michael have got themselves caught up in a seemingly ironic game of power, provocation and sexuality. Esther is already on the brink of madness when a young artist arrives. Requiem for something which is very small is a psychological horror-drama, with a cultural-political morale, and musical interludes.

Gunman Flame and his partner Citron assassinate Nazi collaborators for the Danish resistance. Assigned targets by their Allies-connected leader, Aksel Winther, they relish the opportunity to begin targeting the Nazis themselves. When they begin to doubt the validity of their assignments, their morally complicated task becomes even more labyrinthine.

After the death of her husband, the mother of Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom begins to suffer from a mysterious illness. Aware that she is going to have to go into hospital she opens a bank account for the children, so that they can be financially self-sufficient and will be able to avoid being taken into care by the authorities. Unfortunately she also dies and Julie and Jack (the older, teenage children) decide to hide her body in the basement so that they can have free reign of their household. Soon Tom has taken to dressing as a girl whilst Sue has become increasingly reticent, confiding only to her diary, meanwhile Jack and Julie sense an attraction developing for each other. However Julie's new beau, Derek, threatens to unearth the many dark secrets within this family as he becomes increasingly suspicious of Jack.

A Jewish boy separated from his family in the early days of WWII poses as a German orphan and is taken into the heart of the Nazi world as a 'war hero' and eventually becomes a Hitler Youth.

It was one of the great crimes of the Second World War: from 1941 to 1944, a total of 872 days, the siege and starvation of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht on Hitler's orders lasted. Over a million people fell victim to the blockade, most of them dying of hunger. Countless of these starving people wrote diaries with the last of their strength, and cameramen filmed in the paralyzed city. Evidence from the hell of the siege, many of the film recordings, but above all the written memories on which this documentary on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation is based, remained under lock and key after the war. The voices of those who had suffered through this terrible time should not be heard by anyone, because they did not fit the pathos of the Leningrad heroic song that was officially sung. Most of the recordings come from women. The writers feared neither the enemy nor the Communist Party or Stalin, who often proved incompetent in providing for the population.

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A group of angels look longingly upon the life of humans. Berlin now is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans.

Interdisciplinary studies put into practice is a plane on which HaF's interests and mine coincide. Ideas of fictional research projects in films emerge very early on, or of film as research device, allowing people from different disciplines to come together and discover something, to pursue a line of thought, or just be adventurous. These ideas correspond to a tendency we both have of accumulating knowledge from different sciences, for example so as to bring exact sciences like medicine together with subjects which aren't directly aimed at application, such as religious studies or anthropology.

When, before the revolution, accidentally arrested, the philistine - a tsarist civil servant of high status - falls in deep, lethargic sleep. 20 years later he wakes up and finds himself in a post-revolutionary, still young Soviet Union. He is stunned. He is shocked. But a philistine always finds his way.

Florian and Marie want to spend a cozy evening on the sofa watching a movie. But that's more difficult than expected: the couple navigate through a digital world full of streaming portals, voucher codes, delivery service apps and broken remote controls and keep tripping over themselves in the process.

Film is about the undercover assignment of a BKA officer as the bodyguard of a drug baron. His job is to gather information to put a stop to the cartel. But unfortunately everything goes wrong, "The Bodyguard" is exposed and eliminated in Turkey. He survives, returns and wants to complete his mission despite betrayal within his own ranks.

Eyal, an Israeli Mossad agent, is given the mission to track down and kill the very old Alfred Himmelman, an ex-Nazi officer, who might still be alive. Pretending to be a tourist guide, he befriends his grandson Axel, in Israel to visit his sister Pia. The two men set out on a tour of the country, during which Axel challenges Eyal's values.

Pablo, a 12-year-old boy, receives a scholarship to attend school in the mysterious and isolated Colonia Dignidad established in Chile by German settlers. It seems to be quite a privilege for a kid like him, and he quickly becomes the favourite of the leader of the colony, Uncle Paul. Over time, Pablo witnesses some kind of strange things which happen there and make him act differently than the other students.

The story of the final seven months in the life of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.

Three activists cobble together a kidnapping plot after they encounter a businessman in his home.

A man gets on a train to Cologne. Inspired by a poem by Rolf Dieter Brinkman.

Essay film about Franz Kafka's novel "Amerika".

Essay film about Franz Kafka's novel "Amerika".

While working on a television movie project about Franz Kafka, German actor Hanns Zischler discovered a series of passionate writings in Kafka's journals about his own moviegoing. Zischler, who also wrote a book of the same title, spent the next twenty-five years combing through archives and libraries to locate many of the now-extinct films cited by Kafka in his journals. The result is a witty conjecture on the Czech writer's fascination with film and Zischler's fascination with Kafka.