Alfred Edel

Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.

A short film by Alexander Kluge.

A mockumentary directed by Christoph Schlingensief.

Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...

Vicky, an out-of-work actress, struggling waitress and lesbian has her whole life thrown into turmoil when her father comes from Germany to visit. The main problem is that Vicky has told him she is a successful actress and happily married. She enlists the help of a gay friend to play her husband. Using a large range of characters—gay, lesbian, straight, transsexuals—the film creates a funny and touching view of family dynamics and sexuality.

Taking place around the German reunification of 1990, a group of East Germans cross the border to visit West Germany and get slaughtered by a psychopathic cannibal family who want to turn them into sausages.

Germany in the 50ies: A love story between an eastern spy and a western secretary who detects him (and her love) ...

On 30 April 1945, dictator Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, and prominent members of the Third Reich live out their final hour in the Führerbunker.

The filmmaker René Perraudin made five comedic short films with Otto Sander in the leading role and knits them into a feature film.

A traumatized young man, abused by his father, imagines himself as Adolf Hitler when dreaming of revenge. Schlingensief released this film, which follows no linear narrative structure, at a moment when right-leaning German intellectuals argued for a coming to terms of the country’s relation with its Nazi past. Schlingensief disagreed. (MoMA)

This black and white silent film with music by Helge Schneider, starring Udo Kier as a vampire and Alfred Edel as an Indian chief was commissioned by the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf to inaugurate their cinema organ. The look and feel of the film stems from the silent film era, but the camp style and over use of clichéd characters bears the trade mark of Schlingensief all over. “I love all things kitsch, like opera, and I feel inspired by music. I was interested in silent film but not a great deal”, said the director.

A poignant film essay about 'superfluous people' facing up to a moment of crisis in their lives.

An early declaration of war on narrative cinema, using a barrage of visual and acoustic elements while at the same time juggling ironically - as he still does - with the term 'avant-garde'. A number of other preferences and obsessions were evident at an early stage, e.g. the mind-numbing habit of having his people stumbling and screaming around: life as a race track. His films likewise feature a lot of theatrical and cryptic outpourings. No wonder that they failed at the box office. No wonder either, however, that Schlingensief was attracted to theatre.

A young man, recently arrived in New York from Europe, becomes swept up in a series of events that are beyond his knowledge or control.

Günther, Michael, Barny and Franz, real Munich boys, want to make their own music: Rock 'n' Roll Bavarian-style. Will they go under or make it to the top?

A thriller-comedy by Torsten Emrich.

Hartmann, a first-time film director is trying to find an actor for the Role of Casanova. Wenn he meets Alfred Edel, the actor's colourful personality spoils Hartmann's vision of a glorious Casanova epic. In the end, the director realizes that all the time he wanted to make this movie to please his mother, so he decides instead to join Edel's way of having fun.

Gabi Teichert, a history teacher, is unhappy with the way history is portrayed in textbooks and is looking for an alternative, more practical approach to 'uncovering' the past, quite literally digging with the spade and dissecting books with hammers and drills.

Not porno, not underground film, not a good entertainment film, not documentary, not social criticism nor Hollywood boulevard film or horror show: rather a journey into the midst of night, a hell ride to paradise lost, into our inner self. The mystery play of a historical dance of death in the black studio of our phantasy, the ascetic “Trauerarbeit” (toils of mourning) on the end of an epoch, millions of dead. In old times one would have called it an epos, a poem, requiem, oratorio; an attempt to find a new German identity through film. And also about the heritage of Hitler in our present world, something about the infernal victory of quantitative democracy; about the calmness of melancholy and the thesis that Hitler can only be defeated with Richard Wagner.

Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. He has few skills and fewer expectations: with a glockenspiel and an accordion, he ekes out a living as a street musician. He befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck and they join his neighbor, Scheitz, an elderly eccentric, when he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin.

Jennifer, Tom and Maria like to have sex together and to rob banks when necessary. Action takes place in typical Bavaria.

After having her second child, a German housewife suffers from post-partum depression before inexplicably falling into a continually misdiagnosed mental state, befuddling her relatives.

Combining fictional and documentary modes, Kluge's In Danger and Dire Distress... takes a critical stance toward Frankfurt's public sphere and urban redevelopment. Despite the serious formal and political concerns of the film, Kluge's heightened sense of the absurd safeguards a reserve of utopian optimism.

The film follows Kaspar Hauser (Bruno S.), 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.

Willi is 18 years old and lives on the street. Without a goal in his life he walks around the city and meets several people, helping but also cheating him. When he meets a girl, Monica, he realizes that there are people out there whose lives are even more desperate than his. So he's trying to help her (and him) by planning a great robbery on a supermarket's money transporter.

Roswitha runs an illegal abortion clinic in Frankfurt to support her student husband and children. When she is forced to close her practice she delves into political and social activism.

Willi endeavors to survive in a world where annihilistic galactic battles rage, by taking a job at the centre of power. But it's the wrong side that he takes in this civil war...

A young circus director ends up going into television after her father, a trapeze performer, dies in a circus accident.