Peter Kern

Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.

When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence, he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, among others, Wenders and Fassbinder, for example, as an actor in Wender’s The American Friend. He met Ingrid Caven, who was to play a diva in several of his films. This is a documentation of a part of modern European film history and a good analysis of artistry and how it corresponds to the individual behind the camera. A wealth of archival footage brings us close to many directors and actors in Schmid’s circle. If you’ve never seen a Daniel Schmid film, you are sure to want to after watching this portrait of his life.

Documentary about the current hustler scene in Berlin. Based on interviews with former and active prostitutes, the realities of male prostitutes in Berlin are treated. The film is objective, and records the hustler scene as a social Submilieu, which is characterized by both tragic fates, as well as everyday things and routines. Not only the direct sale of sexual services is discussed, but also other aspects associated with male prostitution: poverty, drug addiction, AIDS, crime, migration, love and partnership.

Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.

Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.

Austrian actor Peter Kern, who doesn't quite play himself, and the naive Berliner Axel Ranisch are thrown together. What unfolds is a scathing, self-deprecating, and revealing satire on gay desire, stereotypes of masculinity, weight issues, and sex addiction.

No synopsis available yet.

When 82-year-old Mary takes her 63-year-old disabled son on a houseboat vacation on Lake Lychen in Brandenburg, things quickly go south as the boat becomes a prison, trapping them within the difficult emotional web of their relationship.

Two directors shoot a documentary about the controversial director and pugnacious actor Peter Kern. But he cannot be easily rammed into the classical form of a documentary.

Meet Jerry, an obsessive but frustrated director who decides to turn his back on the theatre in favour of a controversial new project. But things soon start to go wrong. As he struggles with the demands of his role as leader, he is plagued by surreal dreams conjured up by his guilty conscience. Monkey Sandwich is a portmanteau film with a captivating tangle of stories involving the search for an unborn child, a disturbing hunting trip, a haunted LP, a screaming piglet and a river gone rogue. The stories in Monkey Sandwich are urban myths or stories created with or by the actors. The film was originally part of a stage performance of the same name.

Policeman Simon Polt is on cloud nine. He finally has the village teacher Karin in his arms. But soon he's forced to look into the depths of humanity again: the priest's cook has been found dead. Was it the gourmet critic? The feisty woman had poured soup over his head the night before, in shock at the sight of an illustrious dinner party...

Claire, Romy, Magali, Loete, and Jim are typical Brienen’s characters: their excessive lifestyle rhythmed by sex and drugs puts them in the margins of society, refusing to believe in love or any kind of happiness. Lacking a better alternative, they take a trip to Berlin to perform in their own erotic-trash show. But in Berlin, trouble only begins. Styled images of lost souls straying through the night and their humide debaucheries transport us into an universe of the abject where all moral limits are eliminated by the character’s insatiable bulimia.

16-year old Axel and his clique are rioting in a residential home. There he meets the 80-year old Gustav who gains interest in the young boy, as he reminds him of his lost love.

Two men break out of prison and go on a killing spree.

An unusual story of a triangular relationship in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls under his spell. It will be her last great passion. Her feelings are so strong and all-encompassing that Ivan can neither understand nor return them.

The sexual fantasies of women are explored by four female directors.

Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...

Axel is 14 years old, male prostitute, living in Düsseldorf. His mother drinks and her friends abuses him. He is sent to a bar to pick up customers. There he meets Karl-Heinz, and a loving relationship begins.

Grandma Vera travels by bus from a small Polish town to Pinneberg to celebrate her birthday with granddaughter Linda, her husband Lothar and their two children Jan and Christina. Together with Lothar's stuffy, uptight parents, they spend a fun-filled evening. But the next morning, Grandma is dead. Although Grandma Vera actually wanted to lie next to Grandpa Pyotr in her hometown of Kovalov, the family cannot afford an expensive funeral. So there is only one option: to transport Grandma themselves.

A docudrama about the eventful life of Domenica Niehoff, a high-class prostitute from Hamburg who later became a social worker: Domenica’s mother leaves Italy and her abusive husband, makes her way to Germany with her two children, but ends up in prison, and Domenica and her brother are placed in an orphanage, where they are raised by nuns. At 17, Domenica meets the older, equally violent brothel owner Joseph Rothenberg, who for ten years...

Esther and Sophie are BFF! When it comes to men, they however differ fundamentally . While the career woman Esther is on uncomplicated sex and therefore experienced with her lover Winnie, Sophie is still looking for her prince charming . When she meets Chip , a PC expert , she believes to have finally found this . But then it turns out that Chip is none other than Winnie . From Esther and Sophie are suddenly bitter rivals...

Anna and Lisa, two young women, meet by chance in the vestibule of a bank, and decide after that to go on together leaving a successful trail of bank-robberies through Germany.

Potrait of director Marilou Diaz-Abaya.

A group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess.

A women's prison on a tropical island is a hellhole where the inmates are raped, tortured and otherwise abused by the evil commandant and brutal guards. However, one of the guards falls in love with a beautiful inmate, and decides to help her and all the other prisoners escape.

The Second World War is over and now begins in post-war Germany, the reconstruction. Jakob Formann sees his chance here and begins a rapid rise as an entrepreneur.

This film of a glitzy showbiz world by director Peter Keglevic in his first feature-length effort recounts the saga of a married torch singer whose numerous lovers are meant to steady her nerves and a saxophone player who loves her but cannot get his own act together. Singing and cinematography are pluses.

Based on Annette Kolb’s autobiographical novel of the same name, THE SWING is a lavish, breathless reconstruction of life in Munich towards the end of the 19th century. The deceptively simple story centers around the Lautenschlags, a Bavarian-French Catholic family overflowing with artistry but short on practicalities like financial acumen.

A German woman travels to San Francisco to find her mother, but winds up distracted by the sexually flamboyant culture of the city.

Left alone by his mother for a few days, a Berlin schoolboy tries to escape the city and visit his father in Italy. While preparing for his trip, he encounters illegal immigrants, a teenage prostitute, and the immigration police, and becomes involved in a scandal involving fake passports.

Film extras take possession of a bogus film production company and acting as ideal world of film to persuade one associates mother-in-law of marriage.

No synopsis available yet.

Reel 18 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

No synopsis available yet.

Fox, a former circus performer, wins the lottery of DM 500,000 and can now have the life and things that he has always wanted. He enters an abusive relationship with wealthy industrialist Eugen in an attempt to climb the social ladder. His desperation for love and affection soon spirals into tragedy.

Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.

Frau Emma Küsters prepares dinner late one seemingly-ordinary afternoon in her seemingly-ordinary Frankfurt kitchen. She wants to add canned sausages to the stew; her irritating daughter-in-law thinks otherwise. But the point is moot: Ernst Küsters has not only murdered the personnel director at the soap factory where he's employed but succeeded that by committing suicide.

Nightclub singer La Paloma succumbs to the persistent courting of a chubby, rich admirer and marries him. Before the marriage, she was thought to be dying, but soon she is well. She believes her husband's love has cured her, but her efforts to love him begin to fade as she discovers true love with her husband's old school friend.

The lackluster and plodding Bolweiser has the (mis)fortune to be married to the town’s siren; his trusting nature leads him into serious trouble when she beds nearly every available guy.

A structure-free, four-part examination of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Each part explores a different topic, from Hitler's cult of personality in propaganda to how said propaganda was associated with pre-Nazi German cultural, spiritual, and national heritage to the Holocaust and the ideology behind it, particularly from Himmler's point of view.

Pascale, married to an architect, misses her flight to London and is forced to stay in Berlin, at the Kleinhoff Hotel where she stayed as a student. Karl, a would-be revolutionary lives in the adjoining room and Pascale spies him and his ex-girl-friend through a hole. Then she follows him to a questionable place where she is arrested by the police during a revolutionists raid. When she returns to the Kleinhoff Hotel, Pascale finds Karl crying, and enters his room to console him and they have a love affair.

Reflected in an artificial and bombastically staged illusory world with Wagnerian compositions, glossy and satirical time references, 19th century German figures and traditions are stripped of their mythology and interpreted by the Germany of 1972.

Berlin, 1930, during the rise of Nazism. Hermann Hermann, a Russian emigrant and chocolate manufacturer, married to the capricious Lydia, loses his temper more and more every day when dealing with his workers and other businessmen; until he meets Felix, a vagrant, who seems to be physically identical to him; a disconcerting fact that leads Hermann Hermann to plot a particular way out of a fake world he actually hates.

The leader of a right-wing German political party discovers that an illiterate woodcarver is actually the son of Adolf Hitler.

Leni Gruyetin, a resident of Nazi Germany, lives a tumultuous life as she bears witness to the fascist regime of the Nazis.

Consul Werle holds a reception in honour of the homecoming of his son Gregers. At the reception, Gregers meets his childhood friend, Hjalmar Ekdal, who is married to Gina, a former maid of the Werle family. Hjalmar is unaware that Werle had an affair with Gina and that their 14-year-old daughter Hedwig is not his child. Gregers moves in with the Ekdals with the intention of allowing unsuspecting Hjalmar and his family to share in the "happiness of truth". Hedwig is entirely devoted to a wild duck, which lives on a pond outside their house. When Hjalmar learns the truth about his daughter, he wants to leave his family. Gregers advises Hedwig to kill the wild duck so that her father, impressed by this sacrifice, will return home. On the following day, Hedwig's birthday, she doesn't shoot the duck, but shoots herself instead.

Satire on 19th-century class relations and thinly veiled commentary on the failure of the 1968 political revolution.

When Peter Huber the proprietor of a Bavarian corner newsstand, wins a free trip to New York City in a magazine contest, he is overjoyed. Filled with romantic ideas from the movies, his actual encounter with the gritty realities of the Big Apple are sobering. Nonetheless, he is in for the adventure of his life. First, he meets Karola Faber, the German wife of a U.S. G.I. who has found life in the States not all it's cracked up to be: she has left her husband and makes her living through prostitution. Peter and Karola visit the local German emigré community's Oktoberfest, and win the festival's King and Queen crown. Their prize is a cow, which accompanies them on their further journeys in New York City.

Cunning Hotzenplotz has managed to escape from the village prison with a trick. Kasperl and Seppl immediately set off to recapture the escaped villain. They finally find him in his secret hiding place in the middle of the deep forest. But not only is he at large again - he is also threatening the grandmother with his pepper pistol. He will only release her for a high ransom of five hundred and fifty marks. Together with the courageous constable Dimpflmoser, the two devise a plan. Will they be able to free the grandmother and catch the rascal?

The true story of Adele Spitzeder, who started her own private bank in 1870s Bavaria by promising everyone that gave her money high interest rates. Initially dubbed the "Angel of the poor", she was arrested for fraud after the whole scheme collapsed.

Anna, a 17-year-old girl from Munich, is searching for answers about her sexuality and identity. While living in her affluent world, she feels neglected by her distant parents and her reserved boyfriend, Robert. Her curiosity leads her to unexpected experiences, including a night in a hippie commune and her first night of sex with Robert. Despite these experiences, Anna remains uncertain about her future as she tries to reconcile her family's expectations with her own desires.

Adaptation of Robert Walser's novel about a young man who enters an oppressive servant school.

Former revolutionary Pat and sex worker Meg run a brothel in 1950s Dublin. In addition to five girls and two gay men, the old IRA general Musjö and Mr. Muleady also live in their establishment. One evening, two IRA fighters drag in a prisoner. The hostage is Leslie Williams, a young British soldier who was captured in Northern Ireland and is now to be exchanged for an IRA member...

Two professional bums in search of true love.

At the top of the mountain stands the beautiful Sternsteinhof farm. Leni, a girl from a poor background, admires this farm and wants to become a farmer's wife there one day to escape her poor circumstances. Toni, the rich owner's son, comes at just the right time. When he gives her a written promise of marriage, Toni's father intervenes. He wants his son to marry a wealthy farmer's daughter and sends him to the army for the next few years. Muckerl, a simple wood carver, seizes his chance and courts Leni's favor...