Social & External
A portrait of the people in '70s and '80s St. Pauli.
A portrait of St. Pauli and its people.
A paean to alcohol as a means of survival to this world, and to the ephemeral communities created by our need not to be alone. On Christmas Eve, between six in the evening and four at night, Klaus Wildenhahn films people who are excluded from this "must be" celebration, and land up in a bar in St. Pauli, Hamburg: truck drivers and prostitutes, regular or casual customers, a coach and an amateur boxer... all desperately in search of happiness, tenderness and sex.
It is about brawls, prostitution, a prison escapee, murder and manslaughter. The film wants to be documentary, the director himself appears as moderator and interviewer.
Sailors Jochen, Carlo, and Blacky sign on to an old steamboat. It's a good thing Blacky oversleeps the ship's departure. This allows him to track down a gang of criminals. Their boss is planning an insurance fraud and wants to blow up the ship and its crew.
The local council of the Bavarian village of Mooskirchen has ambitious plans for the small town. Mooskirchen is to become a tourist destination, but this requires money, because at the moment there is not even an access road to the highway, let alone such "attractions" as a spa or a swimming pool. When one day a letter arrives at the town hall informing the community that Mooskirchen has received a huge inheritance, all problems seem to be solved. However, the inheritance is a huge plantation in Africa, valuable but very far away. Ferdl Lechner, the mayor of Mooskirchen, decides to travel to Africa with his friend Karl Köpfle to officially take possession of the inheritance. First of all, they go to Hamburg. The two rustic Bavarians want to enjoy life in the big city for a while, but the two provincials are not up to this kind of jungle.
Rival gangs are fighting for control of Hamburg's notorious harbor district, spreading fear and terror in the process. In the streets, houses and clubs, the thriller shows the lives of a handful of people whose fates will be decided within 24 hours.
A murder has taken place in the “Ostend” hotel in St. Pauli and Inspector Canisius is called to the crime scene. Mentally shaken, Canisius takes up the investigation. A wide variety of guests and couples were at the hotel that night, and anyone could be the perpetrator. Canisius experiences his most difficult case, in constant fear for his son.
Sometimes your fate lies in the hands of those you meet. Filled with promising ambitions, shattered dreams, love and revenge and in the end hope, the story reveals how tangibly interconnected our induividual fates really are. Cabby Robby drives in and around St.Pauli, Hamburg, from sunset to sunrise. He is surrounded by stories of the night. Drowning in human incidents.
A good doctor is out to stop his evil doctor brother from blackmailing his patients.
A pop singer who has been successful on Broadway, is homesick and returns.
Jor and Gerda is a loving couple that lives together in Copenhagen. Jor is trying to make a breakthrough as a writer, without any luck so far. His struggles have caused Gerda to provide for them by selling sexual favors on the street.
The dangerous violent criminal Willy Jensen flees from a prison in Hamburg and seeks shelter at his brother Heinz' apartment. Heinz, an honest taxi-driver, believes in his innocence and helps him - until Willy kills another man in a robbery. After an argument Willy takes his wife Vera, who now lives with Heinz, as hostage on his further flight from the police. Heinz feels responsible for his brother and trails him, which makes it look to the police as if he's helping his brother.
A former U-boat commander becomes a pastor to ease the suffering of young Hamburg women in trouble.
Due to a lack of money, Hamburg pub owner Jonny Jensen brings two partners on board. As soon as the contract is finalized, the ex-sea bear is almost struck by a blow: the shady duo want to turn his quaint harbour bar "Herz von St. Pauli" into a demimonde pub with lingerie shows. Jonny can't let that happen!
In order to bring a police commissioner under control, the criminal group that controls a notorious club that specializes in underage strippers, targets the young teenage daughter of the commissioner who is attempting to become independent by going out at night against her mother's wishes.
Helmut Schmidt is an ambitious Interpol inspector. He follows a trail of dangerous drug dealers that leads to Hamburg. With the colleagues there, he decides to infiltrate the gang. The beautiful dancer Arlette helps him.
A television reporter reports in an episode film about the magazine "St. Pauli News".
The streets of St. Pauli: a gangster who escaped from prison tries to run his little scams in various disguises.
Illustrates both the powerlessness of the ordinary worker as well as an intimate portrait of the joys and sorrows of a small group of people in the harbor section of Hamburg.
A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.
John Shepherd spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of miles into space. After giving up the search, he makes a different connection here on earth.
A depiction of the Wrangelkiez neighbourhood in Berlin. The people portrayed tell their life stories. One woman came to the neighbourhood a decade ago to work in Berlin’s still unfinished Brandenburger Airport, one man reminisces his childhood on a Tobacco farm in Kentucky, another speaks of an exceptional day in an otherwise monotonous workplace. These portraits are interwoven with the story of Elpi, a Greek woman who is waiting for the long overdue visit of an old important friend. The outcome of this mixture is a film which captures the lives and perspectives of some of Wrangelkiez’s most commanding citizens, while at the same time evoking the loss that change and time passing means for places and for people.
Angelic and demonic serpentine dance from dawn of cinema. Hand-colored frame by frame. Lumière no. 765 or 765.1 (colorized, different dancer?).
Brilliant, long in-the-works story of the life and art of the world's greatest comedian and the cinema's first genius, Charlie Chaplin. Produced, written and directed by renowned film critic Richard Schickel.
Artists in LA discover the work of forgotten Polish sculptor Stanislav Szukalski, a mad genius whose true story unfolds chapter by astounding chapter.
A non-narrated documentary following the lovesome lives of four infants from birth to their first birthday. The babies featured are two from rural areas: Ponijao from Opuwo, Namibia, and Bayar from Bayanchandmani, Mongolia, as well as two from urban areas: Mari from Tokyo, Japan, and Hattie from San Francisco, USA.
The life and career of one of comedy's most inimitable modern voices, Mr. Gilbert Gottfried.
Emak-Bakia (Basque for Leave me alone) is a 1926 film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including Rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features. The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso, and some of Man Ray's mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
While in San Francisco for the promotion of her last film in October 1967, Agnès Varda, tipped by her friend Tom Luddy, gets to know a relative she had never heard of before, Jean Varda, nicknamed "Yanco". This hitherto unknown uncle lives on a boat in Sausalito, is a painter, has adopted a hippie lifestyle and loves life. The meeting is a very happy one.
More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq.
Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.
A purely observational non-fiction film that takes viewers into the ethically murky world of end-of-life decision making in a public hospital.
Naples, Trajan's district. Initially it was intended for the inhabitants of the shantytowns on the seafront of Naples, who were homeless after the war. But it soon became a kind of ghetto. Alessandro and Pietro are two teenagers who film with an iPhone to tell their difficult neighborhood, their daily life, the friendship that binds them.
The life of Mr. Spock, as well as that of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played him for almost fifty years, written and directed by his son: Adam.
This character-driven film considers the evolving sex trafficking landscape as seen by the main players: the exploited, the pimps, the johns that fuel the business, and the cops who fight to stop it.
From set designs to character arcs, get exclusive cast and director interviews on how Season 2 of the globally most-watched series was brought to life.
From the heights of her modeling fame to her tragic death, this documentary reveals Anna Nicole Smith through the eyes of the people closest to her.
Andrei Tarkovsky and screenwriter Tonino Guerra journey across Italy in preparation for "Nostalghia." Their location scouting unfolds into a wide-ranging conversation about filmmaking, artistic simplicity, and cultural identity, with Tarkovsky articulating his creative philosophy while confronting the emotional weight of working far from his homeland.
The subject of the film was the Hauka movement. The Hauka movement consisted of mimicry and dancing to become possessed by French Colonial administrators. The participants performed the same elaborate military ceremonies of their colonial occupiers, but in more of a trance than true recreation.
