Ben Becker

Rex Gildo’s songs and musicals made him very popular. His best-known song was “Fiesta Mexicana” from 1972. Rosa von Praunheim tells the story of his life in the context of the gay pride movement, the normative pressures of the Schlager music industry, and the profound changes currently underway.

Being one of the most significant, contemporary painters, Albert Oehlen’s approach is complete refusal of the common art circus. In its own way the Film reflects this very stance. Likewise, it questions the purpose of obsolete thinking patterns created by white straight male artists of a certain age that have dominated the art world for centuries.

The story of Kurt, a young art student who falls in love with fellow student, Ellie. Ellie’s father, Professor Seeband, a famous doctor, is dismayed at his daughter’s choice of boyfriend, and vows to destroy the relationship. What neither of them knows is that their lives are already connected through a terrible crime Seeband committed decades ago.

They once played together in a band called Chix and were inseparable. Today, each of them has their own problems.

Before there were home video formats and the internet, the “Bahnhofskinos” (“Train station cinemas”) in West Germany regularly showed trash and erotica movies. Various filmmakers and especially contemporary witnesses recount in the documentary “Cinema Perverso – the wonderful and broken world of Bahnhofskino” their experiences and impressions.

Germany, 1967. Ruby & Martin, a young couple, are rehearsing their uprising. The price is high: expulsion from school, parental violence, and ultimately institutionalization. But they are ready to take on the cause of love.

Undine rescues a prince from drowning, and leaves him unconscious on shore, where he can be found, but she has already fallen in love with him. Unable to enjoy life below the waves, the mermaid makes a deal with the Sea Witch to become human. The mermaid must also give her voice as payment. And her humanity is only conditional: if she can make the prince fall in love with her and marry her, she can gain a share in his soul and be truly human, but if he marries another, she will die at the next sunrise. It turns out that the witch only made her believe she would die if the prince married another as a Secret Test of Character: by refusing to kill the prince even to save her own life, she proves that she already has a soul. So she remains human, gets her voice back, and sets out to explore the world.

Simon Sachs, a terminally ill ten year old boy, claims to have been a serial killer in his previous life and apparently he can prove it. He leads a lawyer, Robert Stern, to the locations of the bodies, who were killed long before Simon was born. Stern takes on the most compelling and mysterious case of his life.

A story set in a small village in Sudetenland between 1937 and 1945. "Habermann" is based on true events.

CHAOSTAGE is the first real german Punk movie. part fictional, part documentary it tells the story of some young punks...

In this sun soaked adventure for the entire family, a group of five orphaned children form their own makeshift family while attempting to operate outside the rules of society. Though they must sometimes steal to survive, their loyalty to one another means that they will always have a brother or sister to count on.

What does being a Jew mean nowadays? Emanuel Goldfarb, a Jewish journalist, is asked by the Director of a Jewish community in Germany, to respond to an invitation by a professor to tell his pupils about his life as a Jew living in Germany. This conversation, performed by Goldfarb and the Director of the community, is the only scene of Oliver Hirschbiegel's film « Ein ganz gewohnlicher Jude » presented at the Film and Television Festival of Genève, which was shot outdoors and it's the only moment where something apparently happens.

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.

Prussian general's son Friedrich, Freiherr (German baron) von der Trenck, is an unruly student whose countless affairs make him enemies, but he wins every duel. Frederic II the Great recruits him for his personal bodyguard. During his cadet training under the cruel stickler Graf (count) von Jaschinsky Friedrich falls in love with the king's headstrong oldest sister Amalia. She, however, refuses to be married off the the Swedish king's heir. When Prussia makes war on Austria over Silesia, Trenck's loyalty is dubious on account of an Austrian family branch. Janischky eagerly convinces the king there is more.

Zwei, die füreinander bestimmt sind, finden sich trotzdem.

The life story of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jew, who as a physician established the field of sexology, and fought militantly against German anti-sodomy laws in the late 19th century. The script reveals main characters in Hirschfeld's life including impossible love interest Baron von Teschenberg, and Hirschfeld's aids- young Karl Giese and guardian angel, the transvestite Dorchen, as they establish the First Institute of Sexual Sciences in Berlin in 1920, and follows their struggles to keep it open, up to the rise of the Third Reich in the mid 1930s.

Marlene is a 2000 German biopic film directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and starring Katja Flint, Hans Werner Meyer and Herbert Knaup. It follows the life of the German actress Marlene Dietrich and her success in Hollywood.

レコードを聴きながら自殺──。1930年代、世界中でそんな現象を巻き起こし、呪われた「自殺の聖歌」として、発禁処分を受けるに至った曲があった。現在も多くのアーティストによって歌い継がれるシャンソンの名曲「暗い日曜日」である。その後、作曲者自らも死を選んでいる。今もなお、多くの謎を残すこの曲の誕生には、激しくも切ない愛の物語が隠されていた……。第二次世界大戦前夜のブタペスト。レストランのオーナー、その麗しき恋人、店のピアノ弾き、彼らは互いに愛を共有し合う関係を保っていた。しかし、ピアノ弾きが「暗い日曜日」を作曲したことから、運命の歯車が狂いはじめる。生きること、愛することが簡単ではなかった時代。危ういほどに美しい旋律は、”真実”までも葬り去ってしまうのか……。

This documentary tells the story of an unusual victim of the Nazi holocaust -- Kurt Gerron, a German film actor and cabaret star. During World War II, Gerron went from being a leading light of the German entertainment community (he made over 70 films and sang "Mack the Knife" in the first performance of The Three-Penny Opera) to a prisoner directing a propaganda film for the Nazis about a makeshift club at Theresienstadt, which was described as a "concentration camp for celebrities." Gerron was eventually executed at Auschwitz. Director Ilona Ziok combines archival footage of Gerron with interviews of peers and survivors who describe how Gerron tragically believed his gifts as an entertainer would save his life -- and how he enthusiastically kept performing right up to his death.

Comedian Harmonists tells the story of a famous, German male sextet, five vocals and piano, the "Comedian Harmonists", from the day they meet first in 1927 to the day in 1934, when they become banned by the upcoming Nazis, because three of them are Jewish.

Ramona lives her lonely life in Berlin working in a lipstick factory. One day she accidentally runs into Andrzei, a Polish mechanic illegally selling cigarettes in Germany during the weekend. One thing leads to another, and soon she finds herself pregnant. Then her life starts falling apart, when Andrzei tells her he already has a wife back in Poland and her baby dies shortly after its premature birth.

Mara and Manoa are both upstanding and religious Israelites living under the harsh and unjust rule of the Philistines. One day, a mysterious stranger appears to Mara and promises her that she will bear a son whom she is to call Samson.

Harry manages to get into Willi's cell - Marlies is quartered with the ageing prostitute Jutta. Quite a tension between the generations comes up when Harry realises that his father is not the big bank robber, but a small day thief who does not want to flee at all, but only breaks a blanket to celebrate Christmas with his beloved Jutta in her cell to celebrate...

In the beginning of the 19th century, Johannes Elias Alder is born in a small village in the Austrian mountains. While growing up he is considered strange by the other villagers and discovers his love of music, especially rebuilding and playing the organ at the village church. After experiencing an "acoustic wonder", his eye color changes and he can hear even the most subtle sounds.

In the little town of Herzsprung - whose name harks back to an ancient legend of broken hearts - almost nothing has changed since German unification, except a rise in unemployment. Johanna, a young mother and widow, becomes one of the unemployed and lives on welfare. To make matters worse, she falls in love with a dark-skinned, roving adventurer and the whole village starts talking about it.

Protected from the intrigues of con-men by the overwhelming blanket of the former regime in East Germany, at first it seems that Ada Fenske, the elderly widow living on a farm near a soon-to-be abandoned Russian island military base is fair game. The (West) German military intelligence services want to acquire her farm. At first, their agent attempts to buy the property openly, but her refusal to sell motivates him to try far shadier techniques. He comes up with a relative she never knew about who is entitled to a share in the property and tries to blackmail the township's mayor to get his cooperation. However, the hard-working and honest old lady has an ally in the person of her more sophisticated border, a woman who works in the mayor's office and has been to the West. She takes great delight in foiling the underhanded agent.

The naive 18 year old Dobrila leaves her little Serbian village to travel to Hamburg, Germany, where her boyfriend lives. The trip is not easy. Finally in Hamburg she has to realize her boyfriend is not very interested in a relationship. She doesn't tell him she's pregnant and starts on her way home to Serbia, which turns out to be even more exhausting.

Follows the lives of students and their teachers based on the director's childhood memories. The events of the film take places in the actual boarding school called "Gymnasium Canisianum", founded in 1946 by a German catholic priest.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.