Filmgalerie 451

Marga is a forty-two-year-old actress who seems to have already passed the peak of her career. After starting her career in theater on the country's major stages (Volksbühne Berlin, Berliner Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater), it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to find work. Not only in theater, but also in film, it seems to be getting harder to get roles as she gets older and as a woman, especially a woman with a migrant background.

Ecology, equality, sustainability: Anita and Sarah pursue lofty political goals as they establish a new feminist party. By contrast, the men who are infected by a new type of virus tend to have less honorable intentions. The consequences: sexual obsession, molestation, and death. Urgent effort is put into developing a vaccine. But should the male sex be saved at all?

A Tunisian breakdancer falls in with fundamentalists with designs to turn the young man into a suicide bomber.

Wünsdorf in Brandenburg was a military base for decades: first for the Prussians, then for the Wehrmacht and finally for the Red Army. At the center of Elfi Mikesch's multifaceted essay is the pioneer of ecological urban development Ekhart Hahn, who, together with artists, is committed to a new, sustainable use of the site - above all in the interests of peace. Is a catharsis possible after the catastrophe?

Germany, 1945. Soldier Willi Herold, a deserter of the German army, stumbles into a uniform of Nazi captain abandoned during the last and desperate weeks of the Third Reich. Newly emboldened by the allure of a suit that he has stolen only to stay warm, Willi discovers that many Germans will follow the leader, whoever he is.

Elfi Mikesch accompanies Werner Schroeter in staging a tribute to Lautréamont in Berlin.

Three actors - Lizzy, Marlon, and Ohboy - navigate city life between rehearsals, nightlife, and alienation. Marlon, new to town, struggles with his role and babysitting. Lizzy chases fame yet finds only transactional glamour in a club. Ohboy, adept yet trapped, drifts comically through urban traps. Linked by rehearsals for “City as Prey,” three episodes chronicle loneliness, friendship, and survival.

In April of 2013, American singer Patti Smith travels to the grave of French writer Jean Genet in Larache, Morocco. She brings him three stones, which she collected for him over 30 years ago.

Werner Schroeter directed this dark and surreal tale of a man determined to save a lost lover from a grim fate at the hands of a violent mob. The city of Santa Maria is falling into chaos as an armed military faction is poised to take power in a coup d'etat. Ossorio used to call Santa Maria home, and he has returned in its darkest hour to find the woman he loves, hoping to rescue her from the violence that is lurks around the corner. As Ossorio searches for his love, he meets Victoria in a shabby hotel, who in turn introduces him to her father Barcala, who for the right price is willing to take Ossorio and another passenger away on his boat. While Ossorio is willing to pay Barcala what he wants, can he find the mysterious woman before the ship sets sail?

Contemporary cinema’s preeminent chronicler of architecture and its intersection with the ever-present crisis of 20th-century modernity, Heinz Emigholz returns with an alternately mournful and sly treatise on how the presence—and, in some cases, absence—of municipal and communal building architecture is inseparable from capitalist ideology. Focusing mainly on cities and provinces in Argentina, Germany, and Bolivia, Emigholz’s latest film is a work of quiet observation and historical excavation. From slaughterhouses in Salamone to the flooded former spa city of Epecuén to the newly built Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the film demonstrates the effect of capital on public spaces, where creation and destruction go hand in hand, and as always, Emigholz makes the journey one of intellectual force and cinematic beauty.

Everything That Rises Must Converge is a hybrid documentary/fiction film. It follows four real-life adult film performers as they start their day at home, get in their cars and drive to work in a nondescript residential house in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. In between documentary scenes, we also encounter several fictional characters whose stories revolve around the same residential house where the performers work. Shown as a grid of four simultaneous images, the film weaves scenes of everyday life with moments of beauty, as well as the strange and absurd moments of apparent convergence.

Interview with Christoph Schlingensief on his films. Including many film clips.

Lauded artist-filmmaker Heinz Emigholz (Schindler's Houses) offers an exquisite excursus on the work of pioneering French architect Auguste Perret, including privileged views of his innovative concrete structures in Algeria and such magnificent landmarks as Paris' Art Deco Théâtre des Champs Elysées. (TIFF)

Dane, a driver in N’Djamena, hits a nine-year-old pupil walking home from school and takes him to the hospital. When he comes back the next day, he is told that the child has died. He pays a heavy price for his mistake. A few months later, he meets out of fate the boy he thought he killed.

"What is to be done?" three women with artistic and creative professions in temporary living conditions are wondering. They are sharing a flat in an old building close to Berlin Central Station. The area is one of the city's last remaining gaps between buildings. They decide to end their flat share as soon as the first trenches will be dug. With mixed feelings they are heading towards the time when their spontaneous life comes to an end, which means they have to make one or more (life) decisions eventually. The current flat is a symbol for their own life scripts so far: unformed and all bets are off but it already starts to be uncomfortable. They spend the remaining days in their flat with friends, celebrations, discussions and the strong feeling for the dawning of a new era.

In 1988, Cynthia Beatt and the young Tilda Swinton embarked on a filmic journey along the Berlin Wall into little-known territory. The film is now an unusual document. 21 years later, in June 2009, Beatt & Swinton re-traced the line of the Wall that once isolated West Berlin. This film depicts this poetic passage through varied landscapes, this time on both sides of the former Wall.

Heinz Emigholz, the premiere purveyor of architectural oddities (Sullivan’s Bridges, Goff in the Desert), meticulously documents 15 rooms of the enormous Villa Cargnacco in Lombardy, Italy, designed by proto-fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). The controversial figure spent 17 years designing the Vittoriale, a state museum on Lake Garda, and furnishing the Villa Cargnacco, which is part of the grand complex. This unusual documentary resulted from a photography session in the villa, when four friends—cinematographers Irene von Alberti, Elfi Mikesch, Klaus Wyborny and Heinz Emigholz—simultaneously filmed the rooms and furnishings of the villa in their own specific styles.

An archaeologist and a weapons designer, who knew each other in a previous life as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst, meet at an excavation site in the Negev desert and begin a conversation about love and war, which they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. A series of encounters with alternating actors in different roles ensues, which leads the viewer through the cities of Athens, Berlin, Hong Kong and São Paulo. Among those appearing are: an old artist who meets his younger self; a mother who lives with her two grown-up sons, a priest and a policeman; a Chinese and a Japanese woman; a curator and a cosmologist.

Using rich archive material, this documentary looks back at Christoph Schlingensief and his cross-border art project for the 1998 Bundestag elections.

As stated in the opening titles and at the end Freakstars 3000 is supposed to be a commentary on the problems of the non-disabled people. The more I was shocked about how the disabled were depicted in this film the more I started to realize that in every non-disabled TV counterpart of this show (German TV shows like "Popstars" or "Friedmann" or the home shopping channels) its mentally "non-handicapped" participants are treated in a completely identical way: The total prostitution of the mind in front a huge TV audience at the expense of one's most important gifts one should hang on to: dignity. On the other hand one could completely understand people who are furious about "exploiting" these handicapped persons. But that's what Schlingensief's works are all about: shock people and don't care about those who cannot or will not try to get the message (if there is one).