This James A. FitzPatrick Traveltalks short visits the West German cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, and Heidelberg. Included are scenes of World War II destruction that lingered at the time.
Social & External
Narrator (voice)
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.
What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
In southern Germany, winter can still be admired in all its glory every year. With its white coat of snow and icicles and myriads of small crystals that look like geometric works of art. In the valleys and on the slopes the snow is still so thick every year that the alpine huts are snowed in up to the windows. Cows and dairymen are safe in their farms at lower altitudes. But not the wild creatures of the mountains! They need strategies to survive the cold season and to defy snow masses, cold and ice. And some seem to do it so easily that they even raise their young in the middle of winter. But how do animals, plants and fungi cope with the annually recurring ice age, which from our perspective is a time of need? The many adaptations in nature prove that winter is an integral part of the natural cycle of the year and the living environment of species. They are adapted to cold and frost. That is why the animals and plants at the edge of the Alps suffer particularly from climate change!
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
Documentary about filmmakers of the New German Cinema who were members of the legendary Filmverlag für Autoren (Film Publishing House for Authors). Among them are Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.
Explore the tragic truth about the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games in Germany. Through interviews with key people such as the families of slain Olympians, German investigators and an anonymous perpetrator.
Hamburg, summer 1945: The young English control officer Captain Hannes Hacker arrives in the Hanseatic city to initiate the establishment of a new, liberal German radio station - in the Funkhaus on Rothenbaumchaussee. But Hacker also has private ties to Hamburg. He was born here and lived here until he had to leave his hometown on a Jewish Kindertransport.
He built the mightiest army in history and selected its leaders. Eisenhower, MacArthur and Patton all obeyed his commands. George Marshall was the only soldier ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
In this film essay, critic Peter Buchka explores the German cinema of the 1920s, ranging from the disquieting images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the castrating sexuality of Marlene Dietrich in Die Blaue Engel. The program provides an introduction to Weimar cinema, with Buchka's essay narrated over the images from film clips of 1920s era German films.
The film shines a light onto federal chancellor Angela Merkel and her now ending 16-year-long tenure. An era, not an episode. And a vagarious relationship history between the chancellor and the Germans. Who has changed whom here?
This look behind the scenes shows how worldwide camera crews climbed, dived and froze to capture the documentary's groundbreaking night footage.
Helke Sander interviews multiple German women who were raped in Berlin by Soviet soldiers in May 1945. Most women never spoke of their experience to anyone, due largely to the shame attached to rape in German culture at that time.
Exposing the dark underbelly of modern animal agriculture through drones, hidden & handheld cameras, the feature-length film explores the morality and validity of our dominion over the animal kingdom.
Pure tranquillity in rural Somerset, a world away from the war raging on the continent.
Whistlestop tour of Dartmouth in Devon, taking in the 17th century Butterwalk arcade and medieval castle.
On December 23, 2013, former Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt will be 95 years old. As the second Social Democratic head of government in the Federal Republic of Germany, he shaped the country like few other chancellors. Even 30 years after the end of his time in government, he is still a highly esteemed expert whose advice and opinions are in demand. He is one of the most popular chancellors among the population and is held in the highest esteem by his party; even his political opponents at the time pay him the greatest respect.
Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped by the RAF (Red Army Faction). The kidnap had been made to orchestrate the release of the original leaders of the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof.
A documentary of the German national soccer team’s 2006 World Cup experience that changed the face of modern Germany.
The documentary of the Nuremberg War Trials of 21 Nazi dignitaries held after World War II.
This documentary visits the towns and villages of the Alsace region of France at Christmastime. See the charmingly decorated storybook towns and learn of the unique holiday traditions and celebrations. The Alsatian landscape is covered with medieval towns, castle ruins and vineyards, and the communities of the region create a season of enchantment in their celebration of Christmas.
After returning from a concentration camp, Susanne finds a traumatized ex-soldier living in her apartment in bombed out Berlin. Together the two try to move past their experiences during WWII.
The mysterious Count Orlok summons a happily married real estate agent to his castle, located up in the Transylvanian mountains, to finalise a terrifying deal.
A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
A semi-documentary experimental 1930 German silent film created by amateurs with a small budget. With authentic scenes of the metropolis city of Berlin, it's the first film from the later famous screenwriters/directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.
Emmi Kurowski, a cleaning lady, is lonely in her old age. Her husband died years ago, and her grown children offer little companionship. One night she goes to a bar frequented by Arab immigrants and strikes up a friendship with middle-aged mechanic Ali. Their relationship soon develops into something more, and Emmi's family and neighbors criticize their spontaneous marriage. Soon Emmi and Ali are forced to confront their own insecurities about their future.
This award-winning, thrilling story is about a group of discarded kids who revolutionized skateboarding and shaped the attitude and culture of modern day extreme sports. Featuring old skool skating footage, exclusive interviews and a blistering rock soundtrack, DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS captures the rise of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Venice's Dogtown, a tough "locals only" beach with a legacy of outlaw surfing.
Daniel’s drab existence as a physics teacher takes an adventurous turn when he falls in love with a Turkish girl named Melek. He spontaneously decides to follow her to Instanbul by car. On the road across Europe, he picks up his free-spirited friend Juli, who is secretly in love with him.
In the aftermath of World War II, a British colonel and his wife are assigned to live in Hamburg during the post-war reconstruction, but tensions arise with the German widower who lives with them.
Romm pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s–1940s Europe, but also to a firm conviction that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.
Trevor Noah riffs on national anthems, derailing a German sightseeing tour and getting roasted in Paris in this comedy special about his world travels.
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.
Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud travel throughout Europe to film brown bears, wild horses, wolves and other animals in their natural habitat.
A policeman suspects that several bizarre deaths in the same family were murders and that the killer is a mysterious woman who just moved to the village.
Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.
This documentary movie is about the battle of San Pietro, a small village in Italy. Over 1,100 US soldiers were killed while trying to take this location, that blocked the way for the Allied forces from the Germans. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.
The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.