Renate Merck

Though approaching his eighties, Max Kohn shows no signs of slowing down. He pursues his love life - both real and imagined - with youthful vigor, thereby risking his relationship to Reisel, the woman he loves but neglects. LOVE COMES LATELY is a film about real and imagined longings, the never ending dream of love and the power of fiction.

The filmmaker goes on an expedition using a book by Gerhard Roth as travel guide: it is a voyage through the texts. He tells of an inner and exterior voyage, an essayistic trip along the itineraries laid out by Roth. The eight stories told by Gerhard Roth are stories about Austria, encounters with people living on the border, about outsiders and outcasts.

After Roy's demise, five friends try to reconstruct his life by reading through the late editor's notebooks - only to face some very personal demons. The Holy Bunch is a modernist melodrama: beyond-Antonioni in its images, decisively Dreyerian in its spirituality. One of German cinema's few modern (or Modernist) masterpieces.

Ironies abound in this extremely sad melodrama about Elif (Zuhal Olcay), a Turkish immigrant in Germany who has been sent to prison for murdering her abusive husband. At the time of her imprisonment, she has never ventured outside the Turkish community, and even there has had no friends because of the demands her husband placed on her. She speaks no German. Now, in a place which most people find to be hell on earth, she gains a never-before known taste of freedom among these strangers, who don't even speak her own language. Unfortunately, as a "guest worker," she is horrified to discover that she is soon to be transferred to the horrific prisons of Turkey and will stand trial there for her crime, which will be much less understandingly dealt with in her home country than it would have been in Germany. The false paradise she must say goodbye to is her German prison.

A German woman travels to San Francisco to find her mother, but winds up distracted by the sexually flamboyant culture of the city.

Turna is brought from Turkey to Germany by her husband Dursun to start a new life. She soon realizes that he keeps her locked up in their flat every time he leaves for work in order to save her from immoral influences of the Western society. The dream of a better life becomes an inner fight between her culture and her freedom.

Wanda is a dominatrix who runs a gallery in a building on the Hamburg waterfront, where audiences pay for the privilege of watching her humiliate her slaves. She is a business woman who smashes sexual stereotypes and social taboos with icy self-possession and an enigmatic smile. As artist she specializes in the staging of elaborate BDSM fantasies and her affairs transgress the usual boundaries of personal and professional life. Along the way she leaves her German lesbian lover, a shoe fetishist, for an American "trainee," and does more than step on the toes of the male performer who has broken the rules of the master-slave relationship by falling in love with her.

Documentary by Helmut Herbst.