ZDF/3sat

How do people live in snowbound areas? What are the mechanisms for simply moving snow around? How have ski resorts mechanised what ought to be a natural process? A comprehensive study of global warming as it is directly experienced by arctic and alpine communities.

In this film, shot in Drachhausen/Hochoza in southern Brandenburg, film students from Potsdam reinterpret Schiller's play ‘Die Jungfrau von Orleans’ (The Maid of Orleans) and set it in Lower Lusatia. Johanna, the harvest queen, campaigns for the expansion of a solar park. She is celebrated by many for this, but some are hostile towards her. After the cock plucking/łapanje kokota, a scandal erupts in the ballroom.

Henrik Ibsen's drama from 1882 in Ostermeier's vision since 2012. Dr. Stockmann discovers that the source of drinking and spa water is riddled with pathogenic micro-organisms, caused by industrial effluence. He wants to publish the findings in the newspaper and demands that the city council re-route the water pipes. Influential citizens and local journalists promise their support. However, his brother Peter, the mayor, raises some serious concerns: The economic prosperity of the spa town will be threatened. Suddenly the support for Stockman from the town's policymakers begins to wane. They spread seeds of doubt about his plans and try to cover up the fact of the contaminated water. But Stockmann insists on transparency and intends to go public on the matter. For him the affair has long since ceased to be about the polluted health spa, his target is society as a whole.

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.

In this autobiographical documentary, Rosa explores her anxiety, derealisation, and a mother-daughter bond shaped by shared trauma.

Does history with all its nightmares have to keep repeating itself? What bolsters the thin layer that shields us from the abyss?

After years of silence, a mother returns to her dying father, only to fixate on his new partner, using her as a distraction from confronting the person she fears most.

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.

The capitulation of German socialism on November 9, 1989, happened almost incidentally — through a travel law. Thirty-five years after the disappearance of the GDR, this essayistic documentary reflects on transformation through personal memory and public imagery.

The monks were 5 American GIs in cold war Germany who billed themselves as the anti-Beatles; they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, kraut rock, heavy metal, punk and techno music.

The documentary film by and with Stefan Hayn describes how election posters, cigarette, detergent and cinema advertisements refer more or less clearly to topics such as tax legislation, security in old age, increasing fears about losing one's job, and domestic and foreign policy crises. In order to develop this impression, in 1998 Hayn began painting watercolors of billboards that had been put up in Berlin. From the outset, each sheet was intended as a "setting" of a documentary film that would document the economic, political and interpersonal changes that would become visible in "public" images up until 2005.

Portrait of Greek director Theo Angelopoulos.

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

Was grandpa a Nazi? When director Jens Schanze confronts his mother with her father's past, decades of silence have passed. The information that emerges about grandpa does not fit with the loving father that Jens' mother always talked about. Jens and his four older sisters never met their grandfather; he died in 1954. Jens' mother is in her seventies when her son, born in 1971, starts to poke around in the family history. She agrees to a critical examination of her father. Secrets hidden for over 60 years finally come to light. As they uncover the truth, this perfectly normal family goes through a highly emotional journey. Most shaken is the mother; her story of discovery is at the center of the film.

A multi-layered, moving portrait of the filmmaker and winner of multiple Grimme Awards Gisela Tuchtenhagen, one of the first German camerawomen of the 1970s, who has left a sustained mark on the documentary film genre ever since.

With the opera "Le nozze di Figaro" commenced the remarkably successful cooperation between Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The first night of "Figaro", presumably Mozart's most perfect musical comedy, was held in Vienna on May 1st, 1786. It is based on Beumarchais' "scandalous" comedy "La Folle Journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro" which, after its first staging in the pre-revolutionary Paris of 1784, soon became a huge success throughout Europe. For the opera, the revolutionary content of the intricate comedy of love and conspiracy against the background of noble capriciousness was actually toned down but not completely abandoned. The extensive ensemble scenes, the treatment of the orchestra and the delicately nuanced musical profiles of the characters hit the target and, looking back, proved to be pioneering for following generations of musicians.

Don Giovanni, opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Italian libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte) that premiered at the original National Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787. The opera’s subject is Don Juan, the notorious libertine of fiction, and his eventual descent into hell. For Mozart, it was an unusually intense work, and it was not entirely understood in his own time. Within a generation, however, it was recognized as one of the greatest of all operas. Presented by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre with narration provided by Sir Peter Ustinov.