1980s German Movies

A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.

14th-century Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young novice arrive at a conference to find that several monks have been murdered under mysterious circumstances. To solve the crimes, William must rise up against the Church's authority and fight the shadowy conspiracy of monastery monks using only his intelligence; which is considerable.

A German submarine hunts allied ships during the Second World War, but it soon becomes the hunted. The crew tries to survive below the surface, while stretching both the boat and themselves to their limits.

While hiding from bullies in his school's attic, a young boy discovers the extraordinary land of Fantasia, through a magical book called The Neverending Story. The book tells the tale of Atreyu, a young warrior who, with the help of a luck dragon named Falkor, must save Fantasia from the destruction of The Nothing.

Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.

Story of the relationship between two women. Ines, a successful career woman, and Monika, whom Ines takes in after she has attempted suicide.

An account of Baron Munchausen's supposed travels and fantastical experiences with his band of misfits.

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Lake Lucerne in 1868: a passionate and forbidden affair flares up between the gifted composer Richard Wagner and the much younger Cosima von Bülow - the aristocrat is already married and the mother of four children. Contrary to all conventions, the two publicly confess their love - and break a social taboo in the process.

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Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) represents a quintessential moment in film history. The women filmmakers invited to direct for the seven sins were amongst the world's most renown: Helke Sander (Gluttony), Bette Gordon (Greed), Maxi Cohen (Anger), Chantal Akerman (Sloth), Valie Export (Lust), Laurence Gavron (Envy), and Ulrike Ottinger (Pride). Each filmmaker had the liberty of choosing a sin to interpret as they wished. The final film reflected this diversity, including traditional narrative fiction, experimental video, a musical, a radical documentary, and was delivered in multiple formats from 16, super 16, video and 35mm.

German TV film

A teen girl in 1970s Berlin becomes addicted to heroin. Everything in her life slowly begins to distort and disappear as she befriends a small crew of junkies and falls in love with a drug-abusing male prostitute.

Germany in the autumn of 1957: Lola, a seductive cabaret singer-prostitute exults in her power as a temptress of men, but she wants out—she wants money, property, and love. Pitting a corrupt building contractor against the new straight-arrow building commissioner, Lola launches an outrageous plan to elevate herself in a world where everything, and everyone, is for sale. Shot in childlike candy colors, Fassbinder’s homage to Josef von Sternberg’s classic The Blue Angel stands as a satiric tribute to capitalism.

Based on the classic 19th century tale by German writer/composer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the film investigates the tale's themes of obsession and madness, emphasizing expressionist imagery and theatrical style. The story relates the life of the young student Nathanael, whose childhood memories are haunted by a sinister man. As a child, Nathanael believed this dark figure to be the mythic Sandman, who puts children to sleep by stealing their eyes. When confronted by this same evil presence as an adult, he is pushed toward madness as he tries to confront his childhood fears.

A psychological interpretation of the opera mixing in references to the history of Germany, Wagner’s life, German literature and philosophy. The action is centered on Wagner’s death mask. Kundry is the main character – one might read the film as the story of her redemption rather than that of Amfortas.

Susanne is a young single mother who lives a somewhat "carefree" lifestyle. After quitting her job, she finds herself in trouble financially and attempts a minor insurance fraud to make ends meet. Despite its rare view of everyday socialism from a woman's perspective, East German officials were critical of this frank portrayal of a less-than-ideal socialist citizen and turned down all invitations for the film to be screened abroad.

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A young heiress leads a life of excess and wants to marry a man her rich father despises. When her father suspiciously dies, and someone tries to kill her, she surrounds herself with her cousins, friends and lovers, all possible suspects.

Momo is a young orphan girl who lives in the ruins of an old Roman amphitheater and becomes friends with everybody in the neighborhood. But when a powerful international corporation starts stealing everybody’s time, nobody has any time left for her, let alone their friends or families. Momo, together with Master Hora, the custodian of time, are the only ones who can go up against the time thieves before all is lost forever.

Fitzcarraldo is a dreamer who plans to build an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, so, in order to finance his project, he embarks on an epic adventure to collect rubber, a very profitable product, in a remote and unexplored region of the rainforest.

Tommy finds a cursed mirror and a diary in an attic in the new house they moved in. The mirror starts to give Tommy horrible and gruesome visions as his crush keeps rising from the dead.

Set during the fading glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the film tells of the rise and fall of Alfred Redl, an ambitious young officer who proceeds up the ladder to become head of the Secret Police only to become ensnared in political deception.

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After the passing of her husband, the commissioned painter Anneliese Psiko decides to travel across the country. In the Austrian province of Styria, she discovers a strange work of art entitled "Weltmaschine" (World Machine). From now on, it will change her life significantly.

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The Australian Aborigines (in this film anyway) believe that this is the place where the green ants go to dream, and that if their dreams are disturbed, it will bring down disaster on us all. The Aborigines' belief is not shared by a giant mining company, which wants to tear open the soil and search for uranium.

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A nine year old boy named Joey, who after the tragic death of his father, begins to experience psychic powers such as allowing him to move inanimate objects with his mind, set things on fire, and even communicate with his dead father. However, not everything is good for Joey as his newly gained powers accidentally awake an evil supernatural force that is contained inside the body of an old ventriloquist's dummy that Joey found in an abandoned house. The supernatural Dummy shows similar powers to Joey's, and soon he puts the lives of everyone near Joey in danger as the evil Dummy has dark plans for Joey's special powers.

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Magdalena's dark drama spans a period of six weeks. In Berghofen, a village near Dachau, live the honorable, respected small farmers Thomas Mayr, known as Paulimann, and his wife Mariann. They have been married for 37 years ("Und hat mi'koan Tag net g'reut"), but now the woman is wasting away. This is not least due to their daughter Magdalena, who moved to the big city to work as a seamstress, where she went astray and got into trouble with the law. She is now brought home in disgrace, to the jeers of the villagers. Nevertheless, on his deathbed, he promises his wife that he will not chase Leni out of the house.

In his first 16mm film, Christoph Schlingensief plays the German national anthem on the trumpet! An expression of a deep life crisis after being rejected by the Munich Film Academy.

This film was made in the Vierlande prison and tells the story of what it is like to be imprisoned. Nothing is explained; only fragments are visible, which slowly come together. A gaze that often cannot believe what it sees, that "does not trust its eyes."

A writer tries unsuccessfully to sell his screenplays and plays. He marries a television editor, but she only wants to fuck him and thinks nothing of his work. He then remembers his old Parisian lover Rita, calls himself Rita from then on and becomes her wife. When a French director stages a play of his, he meets Rita again in Paris and the two women become a happy couple.

One of Werner Schroeter's most important and inventive works, this threadbare evocation of Jean Genet's notorious Querelle depicts the erotic adventures of two sailors through the world's seaports in the manner of a cut-rate silent movie.

When five Kurdish prisoners are granted one week's home leave, they find to their dismay that they face continued oppression outside of prison from their families, the culture, and the government.

A young actress in Cold War Berlin struggles to decide whether or not to accept a new role, working with an old leftist director in a deserted theatrehouse. Caught between her painful childhood - loss of the mother - and the confusing and instable present political and social situation, she engages with prostitutes, penniless playwrights and postmen of the split Berlin city.

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Pit is in his early 20s and meets the attractive singer Caro. He wants to impress her but lacks the resources. He comes up with the idea to saw off the roof of his car and turn it into a snappy convertible.

Anna and Kurt spent their youth in Berlin, then the capital of the Greater German Reich. In the summer of 1938, they met on board the "Strength through Joy" cruise ship "Ozeana" during a trip to Norway. Kurt and Hanna fell in love and almost got married later, but the war broke them up. While Anna stayed in Berlin, Kurt was taken prisoner. Twenty years after the end of the war, the two met by chance in Düsseldorf and since then Kurt, who now lived in Canada, had come to Berlin from time to time. It was here that he proposed to Anna for the second time. As a preliminary answer, however, Anna had given him her diary from those days...