Thomas Kufus

Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

The flat on the third floor of a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv was where my grandparents lived since they immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Were it not for the view from the windows, one might have thought that the flat was in Berlin. When my grandmother passed away at the age of 98 we were called to the flat to clear out what was left. Objects, pictures, letters and documents awaited us, revealing traces of a troubled and unknown past. The film begins with the emptying out of a flat and develops into a riveting adventure, involving unexpected national interests, a friendship that crosses enemy lines, and deeply repressed family emotions. And even reveals some secrets that should have probably remained untold...

Sandra Hüller portrays Ingeborg Bachmann on an imaginary day in Rome. Regina Schilling’s hybrid film weaves together reenactments, archival footage, and Bachmann’s own writings into a portrait that offers a refreshing new perspective on the author and positions her writings as a reference point in current debates on gender relations and power.

Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

The flat on the third floor of a Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv was where my grandparents lived since they immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. Were it not for the view from the windows, one might have thought that the flat was in Berlin. When my grandmother passed away at the age of 98 we were called to the flat to clear out what was left. Objects, pictures, letters and documents awaited us, revealing traces of a troubled and unknown past. The film begins with the emptying out of a flat and develops into a riveting adventure, involving unexpected national interests, a friendship that crosses enemy lines, and deeply repressed family emotions. And even reveals some secrets that should have probably remained untold...

Sandra Hüller portrays Ingeborg Bachmann on an imaginary day in Rome. Regina Schilling’s hybrid film weaves together reenactments, archival footage, and Bachmann’s own writings into a portrait that offers a refreshing new perspective on the author and positions her writings as a reference point in current debates on gender relations and power.

In 1956 Stalinstadt, East Germany, during the Hungarian uprising against Soviets is taking place, local teenagers perform a seemingly harmless act that causes unexpected consequences.

Together with African small farmholders Tony Rinaudo, an Australian agronomist, has been fighting against the spread of the desert for 30 years and challenges ideas of conventional reforestation with his simple yet effective method.

It is the late 1950s. Flourishing under the economic miracle, Germany grows increasingly apathetic about confronting the horrors of its recent past. Nevertheless, Fritz Bauer doggedly devotes his energies to bringing the Third Reich to justice. One day Bauer receives a letter from Argentina, written by a man who is certain that his daughter is dating the son of Adolph Eichmann. Excited by the promising lead, and mistrustful of a corrupt judiciary system where Nazis still lurk, Bauer journeys to Jerusalem to seek alliance with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. To do so is treason — yet committing treason is the only way Bauer can serve his country.

A man goes for a walk through the countryside with his dying mother.

A documentary about the 20th century German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys.

With dazzling nature photography, Academy Award®–nominated director Markus Imhoof (The Boat Is Full) takes a global examination of endangered honeybees — spanning California, Switzerland, China and Australia — more ambitious than any previous work on the topic.

Tucson, Arizona, September 1996. At the request of his son Martin, George Goldsmith tells him of his past in Nazi Germany as a member of a family of Jewish musicians and the strange history of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization sponsored by Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels.

In 1942 Bavaria, Eva is alone, when Adolf arrives with Josef, his wife Magda, and Martin to spend a couple of days without politics.

Berlin at the end of the 19th Century. Alexander Hoffmann is an ambitious PhD student of Ethnology. When a delegation of the Herero and Nama tribes travels to Berlin during a ‘Colonial Exhibition’, he takes a special interest in their young female translator Kezia Kambazembi as subject for his studies.

Lullabies are our first connection to the world – a universal experience we all share, yet it remains deeply personal. "Can you recall a song that your mother would sing for you to fall asleep?" is the question Tamara Trampe and Johann Feindt ask people they meet in the streets of Berlin.

Four convicted violent criminals, three highly aggressive dogs and a woman who is ready to fight against the cycle of violence and rigid institutions. But above all against her own doubts about redemption from evil.

Ulrike Ottinger weaves her personal memories of Parisian bohemianism and the serious social, political and cultural upheavals of the time into a cinematic “figure poem.”

In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.

Black Box BRD steps back into German history, showing the Federal Republic of Germany of the 70s and 80s. The country is polarized due to the power struggle of the German state and the "Red Army Faction". Society is torn, the fronts are irreconcilable. The life stories of both Wolfgang Grams and Alfred Herrhausen are tragically linked to this era. Grams is the one who takes up arms for moral rigor; Herrhausen however seizes power and dies when powerful.

Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.

Late in the 1980s, two documentary film makers found six German men, all in their 60s and 70s, who had been soldiers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1942. Each carried an 8mm camera into battle and they still had their film. "Mein Kreig" alternates between interviews with these older men, now apologetic, philosophical, or defiant about their participation, and the footage they shot. It's chronological: basic training, the train trip East, roof-top vistas of war-torn Warsaw, peasants in Belarus, the downing with carbine volleys of a Russian plane, winter, a holiday at the Black Sea, mud, impassable roads, death, destruction and retreat. "Home, that was the front," one says.

In this dreamlike film, a nameless father and his son, Aleksei, live together in an apartment in St. Petersburg. Aleksei's mother has died and consequently the two have a very close relationship. When Aleksei acquires a girlfriend, she refuses to take a back seat to his bond with his dad, and breaks up with him. Aleksei is also experiencing nightmares, dreading separation from his father to be a part of the military as his father was.

In December 2025, the extraordinary artist Hildegard Knef would have celebrated her 100th birthday. Her life was shaped by numerous talents, an unshakeable will to succeed and the ability to keep pushing herself forward. This documentary sheds light on the life of the legendary actress and singer.

Astrid is a comedian who makes people laugh for a living; her husband Markus is her manager and the two of them work well together. They have a nine-year-old daughter and are expecting their second child. When they learn that their child will not be born healthy, they are at first optimistic that they will be able to meet this challenge – although they have no idea what awaits them. But the closer it gets to the due date, the more Astrid begins to worry about the future of her unborn child as well as that of her family and her career. After many discussions and arguments Astrid realises that the decision that will affect all their lives must be made by her alone. What complicates matters further is the fact that, as a successful entertainer, she is in the eye of the public and the media.

East Germany. Summer, late 70's. Three years after her boyfriend Wassilij's apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic memories and past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij's mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Plagued by her past and fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.

Coal mining has shaped Lusatia for generations. In the GDR it was still an important industrial location but, after the fall of communism, companies shut down and livelihoods were destroyed. With the planned phase out of coal, the region is facing another upheaval. Britt Beyer takes a sensitive look at the people who must deal once again with the collapse of existing structures and points of reference.

Drawing inspiration from his personal encounter with the Italian refugee child Giovanna during World War II, Markus Imhoof tells how refugees and migrants are treated today: on the Mediterranean Sea, in Lebanon, in Italy, in Germany and in Switzerland.

An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat.

Klaus Kinski is one of the few German actors who has achieved international fame. He made headlines. And disappeared behind them. Kinski lived his parts 24/7. This film tells the story of a man who no longer could understand the difference or distinguish between fantasy and reality.

In November 2023, right-wing thought leaders, politicians from the AfD, CDU and Werteunion, as well as numerous entrepreneurs, met behind closed doors at the Landhaus Adlon in Potsdam. The topics discussed at the meeting were never intended to be made public. But weeks later, the media company Correctiv published the explosive contents of this conference, as investigative journalists were also present undercover. The revelations caused a stir and triggered the largest protest rallies against right-wing radicalism in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, with more than three million people nationwide. Suddenly, Germans were discussing a word that hardly anyone had known until then: "remigration." Award-winning documentary filmmaker Volker Heise tells the story in a fact-rich, gripping, and unpretentious way, like a political thriller, bringing together the voices of those who were part of the meeting and those who exposed it to create an illuminating overall picture.

A family drama about a German teenager who leaves home totally unexpectedly to join the ranks of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in its armed struggle. When the boy's father and older brother set off on an adventurous journey to the Syrian border, they manage to find him and bring him back to Germany. However, back home, questions start being asked: did he return of his own free will, has he disassociated himself from the IS ideology, or is he in fact a 'sleeper' agent awaiting orders?

The retired life in Florida rescued, the Epstein brothers do again what they do best and have practiced for a lifetime music. A Tickle in the Heart captures the past, present, and future of the remarkable Epstein brothers - Max, Julie and Willie - Klezmer music legends on a joyous international comeback tour. This is a cinematic party with three of the funniest men in the show business. The Epsteins are natural performers, and their sense of life, music and family as they tour through places they love.

Follows the artist over two years as he explores his „life after Beethoven“, as he searches for his next challenge, his identity as an artist.

A year of decisions. The country and the city are on the brink, the future is open, no one knows where the journey will take us. The First World War has been over for a good ten years, the defeat not understood, the republic a permanent state of emergency. History has only granted it four golden years. The splendor is based on credit and is already threatening to fade. There are 15 parties in the Reichstag, from the far left to the extreme right, and every government is an impossible coalition.

In 1982, filmmaker Ekaterina Eremenko was among 26 students accepted into Russia’s elite natural science school. A golden future lay ahead of them, but the birth of perestroika and the collapse of the old order meant that that future was no longer certain. Eremenko sets out to discover what happened to her classmates and how the seismic political changes of the 1980s affected her generation.

During the Second World War, Leningrad was besieged by German troops. A merciless struggle for survival erupted. People were starving and afraid, yet they did not give up but kept on fighting, refusing to surrender.

Essay film about German family life in the postwar decades, refracted through TV quiz shows and their hosts' biographies.

The story follows the trajectory of the Russian composer’s life and career, beginning in 1936 when Shostakovich, aged 30, faces Stalin’s wrath after his opera is condemned. A stroke of luck prevents him from becoming a casualty of the Great Terror, and for decades he has to weigh appeasing those in power in Soviet Russia against the integrity of his music.

Gerhard Richter has spent over half a century experimenting with a tremendous range of techniques and ideas, addressing historical crises and mass media representation alongside explorations of chance procedures. This first glimpse inside his studio in decades is exactly that: a thrilling document of the 79-year-old's creative process, juxtaposed with rare archival footage and intimate conversations with his critics and collaborators.

A look at the work of Israel's controversial former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

With the search for her roots her constant companion, actress Adriana Altaras goes on a journey to find a country which no longer exists - and along the way discovers a whole lot more.

This small film came out of the material edited for Sokurov's five-hour documentary Spiritual Voices.

A documentary on Aktenzeichen XY - ungelöst, one of the most popular and long-running German TV programmes that deals with true crime and employs interactive elements.