A murderous community of heirs is looking forward to big money too soon. After a long time, the Dargatz family meets again for the grandmother's funeral on her farm. Leo, the local priest, is entrusted with the regulation of family affairs and the opening of the will. What begins as a harmonious family gathering is slowly becoming a drama about hidden passion, greed and lust for murder. And the devout Leo must learn that not everything that is meant well ends well.
Together with the ensemble of the Vienna Burgtheater, led by Kirsten Dene and Gusti Wolf, Franz Wittenbrink accounts in a wonderfully funny way with art and commerce in times of Mozart mania.
This film is about the difference between law and justice. A national socialist is accused of having stirred up some people against foreigners. A judge has to decide whether he has done so or if his statement comes under the constitutional given freedom of speech. This is compared with a trial in the third Reich. A young woman is being accused of having a relationship with a jew. The film confronts two views of law: the judgement is only based on the current law or the judgement may be influenced by socio-political events and sense of justice.
The Threepenny Opera proclaims itself "an opera for beggars," and it was in fact an attempt both to satirize traditional opera and operetta and to create a new kind of musical theater based on the theories of two young German artists, composer Kurt Weill and poet-playwright Bert Brecht. The show opens with a mock-Baroque overture, a nod to Threepenny's source, The Beggar's Opera, a brilliantly successful parody of Handel's operas written by John Gay in 1728. In a brief prologue following the overture, a shabby figure comes onstage with a barrel organ and launches into a song chronicling the crimes of the notorious bandit and womanizer Macheath, "Mack the Knife." The setting is a fair in Soho (London), just before Queen Victoria's coronation. In this production, Weill champion HK Gruber led the Ensemble Modern in a performance of Weill's complete original score, the first time it had been heard in Germany in many years. This production was broadcast on German television (3sat).
