Ulrike Müller

Twelve years after he fled, career criminal Trojan returns to Berlin. A valuable painting is set to be stolen in the city. But the meticulously planned heist soon runs out of control.

The undercover investigator Robert is supposed to win the trust of a criminal through a fictitious relationship with Leni. However, the feelings are not just a game. It is the spied criminal, of all people, who makes him confront his contradictory feelings…

How can cinema engage with complicity in crimes against humanity, extreme violence and state terror without conniving in it? De Facto finds answers to this question via two actors, a precisely compiled collage of texts and a deliberately reduced setting.

Eva is struggling to live happily with her autistic son Felix. The two are inseparable, but Felix's frequent outbursts of anger, the constant problems at school and his fear of strangers are almost impossible for Eva to cope with. One day when Felix accidentally seriously injured Eva, suddenly nothing is the same as it used to be.

After returning from a police mission in Afghanistan, Chief Inspector Harder is set to investigate a bog body found in a village called Friedland. The confrontation with Friedland's brutal history brings a grave guilt from Harder's own past to the surface and forces her to face the echo.

In this dystopian world set in the near future, everyone’s reputation is measured and visible. Your “Karma count” defines you, as Cee soon discovers. Victim of a sexual assault that goes viral on social media, the young graphic designer becomes more ostracised as she fights back.

Perhaps they should never have met, but fate wanted otherwise. Monika and Joseph. She is a curator, he is an immigrant from Congo, a businessman with an unclear past and present. They meet during a police raid at a bar, when the first of many sparks flies between them. An understated love story, a melodrama without pathos, a fragile story about the ambiguous nature of love and the impossibility of overcoming it through reason.

In the not-too-distant future: after a global catastrophe has wiped out nearly all of humanity on Earth, an elite astronaut from Space Colony Kepler must make a decision that will seal the fate of the people on both planets.

Rojda, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a soldier in the German army, travels to a refugee camp in Greece where she manages to meet her mother, who has bad news about her sister Dilan.

Lisa is moving. Upheaval all around: Her mother flirts with a handyman. An eccentric woman seems to be preparing for a glamorous event, a family next door returns from vacation, and a girl documents the adventurous day. As boxes are transported, walls painted white, and furniture is assembled, underlying problems in need of fixing are revealed, a to-do list expands, and desires and needs flair up.

A Danish summer: long days turn into blue nights. A tunnel is being built to connect Denmark and Germany. Three people meet and part ways again.

In the life of TV presenter Lisa, everything revolves around her talk show, celebrities and the ratings. There is just as little room for love as there is for her mother Maria. When the 66-year-old loses her memory after a fall in her apartment and wakes up in the hospital, she can only remember that she has never been to New York and sets off immediately. Lisa goes in search of Maria with her makeup artist Fred. She struck gold on a cruise ship that was just leaving for New York. As stowaways, the three have no choice but to earn the passage. While Fred is hired as an assistant by the Greek on-board magician Costa, Lisa and Maria have to work in room service. The crossing soon takes surprising turns for mother and daughter: Maria falls in love with the charming dancer Otto, who supposedly knows her from before, and Lisa takes a liking to the widowed statistician Axel Staudach, who is traveling with his son Florian.

Encouraged by her father who hopes to save her from a life in the provinces, Jette is about to spend a year volunteering overseas. But love stands in the way of her father's plans, and she no longer knows what she wants.

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

Hamburg, St. Pauli, New Year's Eve. Oskar Wrobel runs a music club in an old hospital at the edge of the Reeperbahn. While fireworks go off in the streets of St. Pauli, he prepares the big final party - the club has to close. Thankfully there is no time to think about it because the chaos is breaking into his living room, all while hell break loose at the club. The film, based on the novel by Tino Hanekamp, was filmed with hundreds of extras attending a real-life three-night-long party.

Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.

After a failed anti-Nazi sabotage mission leaves his eleven comrades dead, a Norwegian resistance fighter finds himself fleeing the Gestapo through the snowbound reaches of Scandinavia.

Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.

A father tries to rekindle his relationship with his son after years of absence and lack of communication. He takes him on a car ride across northern Norway, hoping it is not too late.

On 9 April 1940, German soldiers arrive in the city of Oslo. The King of Norway faces a choice that will change his country forever. The King's Choice is a story about the three most dramatic days in Norway's history, the royal family's escape and King Haakon's difficult choice after Nazi Germany's invasion of Norway.

When Adolf Hitler reawakens at the site of his former bunker in present-day Berlin, he is mistaken for a comedian and quickly becomes a media phenomenon.

A model family's happy life unexpectedly goes off the rails when the carefree Hedi, played by Laura Tonke, suddenly starts having panic attacks. First mental illness and then drug dependency – the happiness that these happy-go-lucky thirty-somethings once took for granted suddenly seems unattainable, and their world fragile and uncertain.

Fabian Groys, a renowned journalist for a political news magazine, enjoys great freedom, since the stories he uncovers make for good sales. When he loses a hot story about the German army, the editor saddles him with a young female intern. Fabian hates teamwork and sticks the intern with what seems a classic tabloid story about the suicide of a man who had himself torn to shreds by a lion at the zoo. But thanks to the intern’s dogged determination, signs emerge that the story Fabian was working on and the gory zoo story are actually interlinked. Is it pure coincidence? And if it isn’t, how can Fabian fight a nebulous enemy?

Agnes, a teacher from the Hessian provinces, has come to Berlin to identify a dead girl who might be Lydia, her runaway daughter. It turns out not to be Lydia, but Agnes stays in the city anyway. Still frantically looking, she comes a young stray called Ines who no longer leaves her side...

Helen is a nonconformist teenage girl who maintains a conflictual relationship with her parents. Hanging out most of her time with her friend Corinna, with whom she breaks one social taboo after another, she uses sex as a way to rebel and break the conventional bourgeois ethic. After an intimate shaving accident, Helen ends up in the hospital where it doesn’t take long before she makes waves. But there she finds Robin, a male nurse who will sweep her off her feet...

Canada, the summer of 1898. A group of German settlers travel towards the far north in covered wagons with packhorses and their few possessions in tow. The seven travellers set off from Ashcroft, the final railway station. Along with their leader, flamboyant businessman Wilhelm Laser, they are hoping to find their fortune in the recently discovered goldfields of Dawson, but they have no idea of the stresses and dangers which lie ahead on their 2,500 kilometre journey. Before long uncertainty, cold weather and exhaustion begin to take their toll and conflicts escalate. The journey leads these men and women deeper and deeper into a menacing wilderness. (Berlinale.de)

Marisa, a 20-year-old German girl, hates foreigners, Jews, cops, and everyone she finds guilty for the decline of her country. She provokes, drinks, fights and her next tattoo will be a portrait of Adolf Hitler. But Marisa's convictions begin to crumble when she meets a young Afghan refugee, and she learns that the black and white principles of her gang are not the only way.

Ebbo and Vera Velten have spent the better part of the past twenty years living in different African countries. Ebbo is the manager of a sleeping sickness programme. His work is fulfilling. Vera, however, feels increasingly lost in Yaounde’s ex-pat community. She can’t bear the separation from her 14-year-old daughter, Helen, who is attending boarding school in Germany. Ebbo must give up his life in Africa or he risks losing the woman he loves. But his fear of returning to a land now remote to him increases with each passing day. Years later. Alex Nzila, a young French doctor of Congolese origin, travels to Cameroon to evaluate a development project. It’s been a long time since he set foot on this continent, but, instead of finding new prospects, he encounters a destructive, lost man. Like a phantom, Ebbo slips away from his evaluator.

Umay is a young woman of Turkish descent, fighting for an independent and self-determined life in Germany against the resistance of her family. Her struggle initiates a dynamic, which results in a life-threatening situation.

"In the Shadows" slithers through underworld Berlin in grand style. En route to a twisty finale, German writer-director Thomas Arslan keeps his audience glued to the increasingly desperate actions of Trojan, a thirtysomething career criminal whose latest job slowly catches up with him.

Despite having lived in the East German countryside for several months, teenager Lars and his dad, Henrik, are still treated as unwelcome guests. Henrik is building a “marriage barn,” a proposed bed-and-breakfast for newlywed Berliners.

Melanie Straub lives aimlessly into the day, or more accurately: into a Saturday. She′s alone at home, surrounded by the emptiness of her new life.

A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more.

Max and Moritz are two young brothers living an adventurous life of petty crime in Hamburg, Germany. After the two boys steal a car and get into an accident, with the adolescent daughter of a Hamburg Senator sitting in the passenger seat, the two scoundrels are packed up and sent to a boot camp. This military-style camp is run by Axel and Henry, two former East German soldiers who still strongly believe in Communism but are secretly gay lovers. Max and Moritz steal another car...a red Ferrari owned by small-town pimp Murder-Hanne. The nationalistic sadist teaches the boys a painful lesson, but Max and Moritz wouldn’t be Max and Moritz if they let this weekend-fascist get them down... and when they acquire the key to their military school’s ordinance depot, things start to change.