Clara

A look at the lives of 19th-century composers Clara and Robert Schumann.

No Mercy, No Future

Doctors say that Veronika, a woman in her 20s, is schizophrenic. She is compliant, which makes her an easy target for men. She's religious, believing she is God's favorite child; she searches for Jesus. She has sent a letter to a filmmaker suggesting her life as the subject for a movie. We see her raped then take up with a series of men she believes are Jesus, each willing or insistent on sex. A young man with his own crisis of faith invites her to join a cult. We see her involuntarily committed to an asylum from time to time where medicatio...

Shirin's Wedding

In order to be reunited with Mahmood (Ören), a man she was promised to as a young girl, 20-year-old Shirin (Erten) leaves the life she had in a small village in Turkey in search of him.

Earthquake in Chile

Tutor Jeronimo and heiress Josephe fall in love but are quickly torn from one another by execution and jail. However, when fate intervenes in the form of a massive earthquake, the two lovers have no idea what is in store for them.

Hermann My Father

"Hermann mein Vater" is a companion piece by director Helma Sanders-Brahms to her 1980 film "Germany Pale Mother". The latter work was focused on the impact of war on a German family. This made-for-tv documentary follows Sanders-Brahms and her father Hermann on a trip to Normandy, where he was stationed as a soldier in 1940-41.

Angelika Urban, Sales Assistant, Engaged

Documentary about the everyday routine of the sales assistant Angelika Urban.

The Future of Emily

Emily, a child, stays with her bourgeois grandparents during frequent periods when her mother makes films. Isabelle wraps a picture, flies to her childhood home to pick up Emily, and plans to leave for her place in France. Old wounds between Isabelle and her parents open around Isabelle's life style. It's also apparent that Isabelle's mother, Paula, is unhappy - with her husband and with her youthful hopes dashed when she became pregnant with Isabelle. Unbeknownst to Isabelle, the co-star of the film she's just made has followed her, checked...

My Heart Is Mine Alone

Helma Sanders-Brahms directs this inventive film that uses the verse of Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler and Nazi poet Gottfried Benn to dramatize the passionate, real-life affair between the two unlikely lovers. Forced out of Germany, Lasker-Schüler makes her way to Jerusalem even as Benn discovers the true nature of the Nazi ideology he had once championed. Lena Stolze and Cornelius Obonya star.

Laputa

Extensive dialogue and the tight focus of a single apartment setting marks this romantic and politically symbolic drama about Malgorzata, a Polish photographer (Krystyna Janda) and her married French lover Paul (Sami Frey). The two rendezvous in West Berlin to spend some time together before Malgorzata has to go back to Warsaw and Paul returns to his wife and daughter.

The Last Days of Gomorrah

Her only foray into science fiction—about the havoc wrought on society by a television that satisfies every human craving—The Last Days of Gomorrah was a favorite of Sanders-Brahms, who brought feminist politics to the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. It is a forceful piece of capitalist realism, critiquing working-class alienation and commodity culture.

Der Angestellte

Apple Trees

When East Germany ceases to be separate from its western half, one would think that things would be better for the couple in this movie who have been plagued by sexual and political harassment of the most virulent kind, but , they are completely unprepared to cope with the swift changes that are transforming their familiar yet desperately unhappy world. In the story, Heinz is a laborer in the cooperative apple orchards of an East German village and has married his sweetheart Lena. She works to take care of the sickly wife of the co-op's mana...

Jews in Berlin

No folkore, no rituals, no klezmer, no political statements, no twee Berlin Jewish quarters. This film is an attempt to make an imageless film; a plea for a religion of imagelessness, of words, of thoughts.