Lonig & Havendel

To see snow and learn German, the young Vietnamese girl Trúc Lâm (Nano Nguyen) moves to a small town in the middle of the Erzgebirge mountains in Saxony. She is fascinated by the forest, the mountains and the clear air that smells of clouds and winter and burns her nose when she breathes it in - for which she is mocked by her classmates. On a trip to a mine, she gets lost in the labyrinth of dark shafts and suddenly emerges on the other side of the mountain. This world is almost identical to the old one - but the characters have been replaced. In the town on the other side, she meets Duc (Tri An Bui), the son of a Vietnamese family who run an Asian snack bar. And while Duc tries to find a balance between his German-Vietnamese heritage and the expectations of others, Trúc Lâm accepts the help of a ghost to find her way back into her world.

2025-01-22 | de

Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser...

The corner Schönhauser Allee in East Berlin is the main meeting-point for a group of adolescents. Dieter is a construction worker who falls in love with Angela. She, in turn, spends time with the clique whenever her mother is occupied with her new lover. "Kohle" stays away from home to avoid his dad's alcohol problem, and Karl-Heinz is on his way to becoming a small-time criminal. Due to their interest in western music and culture they are regarded as no-goods and rowdies. Things get interesting when an incident forces Dieter and "Kohle" to escape to West Germany. Written by c.winter

1957-08-30 | de

Westwind

Set in the Summer of 1988 and based on real events, the film tells the story of East-German twins Isabel and Doreen, two aspiring oarswomen, whose lives are changed dramatically during a training camp at Lake Balaton in Hungary. There, the girls make the acquaintance of West-German friends Arne and Nico. The holiday flirt soon turns serious when Doreen and Arne fall in love. As the end of their stay approaches, Arne asks the inseparable sisters to flee to the West with him…

2011-08-25 | de

The Rabbit Is Me

Maria, a young student sees her brother Dieter going to prison for sedition against the state. She starts an affair with Paul, a judge who turns out to be the one who sentenced her brother, which eventually leads to a confrontation.

1965-10-25 | de

Whispers of Freedom

When Chris Gueffroy becomes increasingly disillusioned with his life in 1980s East Germany, he hatches a plan with his friend, Christian Gaudian, to escape the isolated Eastern bloc state without telling his mother, Karin. The pair believe that the standing order to shoot anyone who crosses the Berlin Wall, as ordered by the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, Erich Honecker, has been lifted due to the state visit of Swedish PM Ingvar Carlsson. The young men seize their chance and attempt the fateful escape to the west.

2024-11-01 | en

Auf der anderen Seite die Freiheit

2022-05-07 | de

Sushi in Suhl

One evening in the mid-sixties, Rolf Anschütz, a chef who runs a small restaurant in a town called Suhl in the middle of the East German province of Thuringen offers his guests a unique and exotic meal - Japanese Sukiyaki. It was intent to be a surprise for some of his best customers and it became a great success. Even the local paper wrote about it - and this should change the life of Rolf Anschütz forever.

2012-10-17 | de

No One Sleeps

Stefan, a young gay East German medical student, arrives in San Francisco for a medical congress and is following the trail of his dead father, a once high ranking AIDS researcher in the East. Stefan is investigating whether the HIV virus was an incremental result of secret human experiments that were conducted in US prisons in the seventies - a thesis of the Berlin professor, Jakob Segal, which was spread by state agents of former East Germany. At the same time, a serial killer is haunting the gay bars of the city and is killing HIV positive long-term survivors.

2000-02-12 | en

Das Wunder von Berlin

East Germany, 1988: working as a state security service agent, Jürgen Kaiser is loyal to the party line, but worried about his son Marco, a punk. As he is arrested after a concert, Marco is forced to join the army, where he surprisingly identifies with socialism and believes he has to defend his country against the capitalist enemy. While Jürgen is astonished, his wife Hanna and Marco's girlfriend Anja, supporting the civil rights movement, don't like his new attitude...

2008-01-26 | de

Paths in the Night

Set against the backdrop of post-unification Germany, the film explores the breakdown of relations in a decaying social structure.

1999-11-24 | de

November Days

Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.

1991-02-16 | de

Sky Without Stars

Anna is a factory worker in East Germany. Her five-year-old son Jochen lives with his grandparents in the West and Anna wants him to live with her, so she abducts him. Along the way she meets Carl who helps her with her son and they fall in love.

1955-10-14 | de

Reunification in the Ice: The Story of the Last GDR Antarctic Explorers

In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster research station in the Antarctic. During their expedition the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. Cut off from the images that go around the world, the men can only experience the historical events passively. When they returned in the spring of 1991, their homeland was a foreign country. The documentary reconstructs the thoughts and feelings of the East German researchers on the basis of eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, film material, grandiose landscape shots from the location of the action and unique photos to make the consequences of the events tens of thousands of kilometers away on the small GDR expedition in the middle of the eternal ice tangible.

2020-10-02 | de

Fatherland

Persona Non Grata in his homeland, protest singer Klaus Drittemann must leave East Berlin, his wife and child and emigrate to West Berlin, where the representatives of an American record company are eagerly waiting for him. They plan to exploit his defection from communism both ideologically and financially. But Klaus, as ill-at-ease in the West as he was in the East, is reluctant to be used as an expendable commodity. Leaving his contract unsigned (or signed in his manner), he leaves for Cambridge to meet his father, a concert player, who -just like him - left East Berlin thirty years ago as Klaus was a little boy. He is accompanied by a young French journalist, Emma, who knows where his father has been living since he disappeared for more than a decade. The young lady is cooperative but might hide things from him...

1986-09-02 | de

Night Crossing

Two men want to escape from East Germany (under Communist rule) but they will only go if they can take their families with them. Based on a true story.

1982-02-05 | en

Barbara

In 1980s East Germany, Barbara is a Berlin doctor banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good natured clinic head, Andre.

2012-03-08 | de

...and the father stayed in the war. Encounter with Syrian orphans

Director Junge was commissioned by the GDR in the country for the first time in the summer of 1970; his film In Syria auf Montage accompanies German engineers who train workers in the Homs textile factory. Shortly after filming ended, Hafez al-Assad put himself under the dictator. Twenty years later emerged ... the father stayed in the war over a youth club with Syrian orphans in Bad Saarow, whose fathers had died in the Lebanon war and accompanied them to Syria, where they were housed in separate, elite "schools of martyr children". Multi-faceted documents that oscillate between peaceful and tense, hopeful and unsettled.

1990-06-19 | de

The Baldheaded Gang

August 1961. The former Foreign Legionnaire, King, has collected a gang of hooligans, with whom he creates mischief in the GDR. After some careless work on a construction site, an event during which two people lose their lives, they move to a campsite on the Baltic Sea. With sputtering mopeds, loud radios, and occasional outbursts, the gang makes the vacationers' lives living hell. Unfortunately for them, Lieutenant Czernik discovers the connection between them and the accident at the construction site. To stop them from fleeing to West Berlin, Lieutenant Czernik and the police need to arrest them, one at a time, with King as the last.

1963-02-15 | de

Das Romeo-Prinzip

Tom does not have it easy. At the student theater, his friend Jan and his beloved Annelie play the leading roles; the inconspicuous Tom, on the other hand, makes the prop. When he realizes that he must finally take his life, and especially love, into his own hands, he turns to his janitor, Mr Müller. What Tom does not know: Müller was once a psychologist of the Stasi! In the so-called "Romeo" program, he prepared male agents to address women in Germany and make them available as a source.

2015-11-12 | de

Kati: A Freestyle That Stays

Four years after the end of the German Democratic Republic, Katarina Witt, two-time Olympic champion, is planning her comeback to prove to herself and to a united Germany that she still has what it takes. To do this, she has to team up with her former coach Jutta Müller and complete the toughest training of her life.

2024-07-01 | de