Sergej Gleithmann

Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist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 dangerous gangster called the Lizard escaped from prison. He steals chickens and spits on old ladies. There's only one man who can catch him: the commissioner Roy Schneider!

A musician tries to get by working several jobs.

The funny clown Bratislav Metulskie is found dead in circus "Apollo". The retired commissioner 00 Schneider is asked to assume control of the case. Schneider and his aged sidekick Körschgen investigate to find the murderer.

The dreaded Doc Snyder returns home after 30 years. After his long ride through the prairies of the wild west, his laundry is extremely dirty, and who could wash it better than his unshaven mommy? But first she sends him to the prison, from which he is to free his brother Hank, because otherwise he will be hanged. When that's done, they both spontaneously decide to rob a bank, which goes completely wrong. Before Doc Snyder's eyes, his beloved brother is shot by his intimate enemy, the Nose Man. Snyder initially manages to escape, but the Nose Man takes up the pursuit, and from then on many innocent people have to die - including Snyder's mother...

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.

Mutters Maske aka Mother's Mask is a free adaptation of the film Opfergang (1944) aka The Great Sacrifice of Veit Harlan. Schlingensief exposes his source material's dangerous proximity to kitsch and camp by reducing the genre conventions known from Harlan, Sirk, Fassbinder & Co to the level of a daily soap: set within a noble family from the German Ruhr, Schlingensief's story revolving about Willy von Mühlenbeck's tragic love to terminally ill neighbor girl Äls (Susanne Bredehöft) and the inheritance intrigues by his evil brother Martin von Mühlenbeck (Helge Schneider) creaks with melodramatic devices and self-conscious dialogues. Rather than being a mere spoof, "Mother's Mask" is perhaps Schlingensief's purest black comedy.

"Stangenfieber" is an almost 30-year-old short movie which runs for nine minutes. It is the first directorial effort by Helge Schneider and came out shortly after "Johnny Flash". In this full feature, Schneider was not yet director and writer himself, but with "Stangenfieber", which sounds like some tropical illness, he took that past and should also be involved with these crucial aspects of filmmaking in pretty much every upcoming film starring himself. Most of the cast in this little project are Schneider's pals and they have returned in other of his films later on, especially Peter Thoms, a longtime companion for the extravagant genius that is Helge Schneider. About "Stangenfieber", it is a movie probably even more experimental than "Johnny Flash". There is one aspect of this short movie, which occurs frequently in his films as well: men wearing drag and playing female characters, in this case a tutu. -http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2302835/reviews

Egomania is a visually stunning end-of-the-world melodrama about lust, jealousy and murder set amidst solar eclipses, orchestral chants and the distant thunder of the boiling sea. The film’s characters – riddled with unconscious desires – find themselves imprisoned on an island. Drawing parallels to the work of British filmmaker Derek Jarman and staring Jarman’s actress-muse Tilda Swinton, Schlingensief’s raw and almost mythological film stands in contrast to his more offensive efforts.

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)

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.