Martin Schäfer

This first film by choreographer Pina Bausch reflects her method of working as developed with the Wuppertal Theatre of Dance during the 1973/74 season. The film does not tell a story, but is made up of various scenes put together as a collage with scenes set in different locations. The futility of human activity and the search for love make up the film's central theme set against the strains of a Silician funeral march. Filmed on location in Wuppertal, Germany, between October 1987 and April 1989.

Nino, tough but sickly, and his older brother Vicente live in the country with their father. After their father disappears ― we’re never sure why ― murder is suggested. Vicente brings his girlfriend to the house, and a different kind of family is established as the three youngsters grow fiercely protective of each other. But their uncle grows suspicious about the fate of the missing father and forcibly kidnaps Nino, taking him away to the city and leaving Vicente to locate him there.

The first film in Rudolf Thome's "Forms of Love" trilogy is the most incisive. It's a comedy-drame chronicling the ups and downs in the relationship of an unmarried couple (Adriana Altaras, Vladimir Weigl). When she tries to persuade him that they should have a child, he escapes the controversy by becoming preoccupied with his new aquarium and microscope. Their struggles to settle their differences and accept new responsibilities are presented intelligently, realistically and with low-key wit and irony.

Two bank robbers hold the clerks hostage and demand 3 million German marks as ransom. What the police do not realize is that the true criminal mastermind watches them from outside the bank, anticipating every move.

At the start of the 20th century, a man lives in solitude on an island. One day on the mainland, he saves a young woman from some nasty folk and takes her with him to his island. Her former captors soon find the island as well.

Angela, a seventeen-year-old girl who is only known by the nickname “Bibo”, faces the world, especially the world of men, with a defiantly self-confident demeanor that doesn't accept defeat. Until she meets the young musician Mischi, one of those “Gelackten aus der Stadt”...

A director, his fiancee, a scriptwriter and a student interact and discuss their emotions, at length.

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.

Nine Manhattanites receive a chain letter. Depending on their decision to either pass the letter on or to break the chain, the various characters can encounter romance, fulfillment -- and sudden death.

Documentary about Anton Chekhov and his descendants in Moscow. Vera Tschechowa, who is the great-grandniece of the poet and writer, meets with family members, writers, and theater professionals. Past and present merge into a poetic journey of discovery into a country that, until then, had been little known in the realm of artistic sensibilities.

An old man and a teenage boy, both neo-Nazis, are travelling across Germany to take funds to the party headquarters. On the way they encounter a young woman and things become difficult.

The story of a woman who has to choose between two men. Shot in black and white and in the classic silent movie format. There is no camera movement, neither a pan nor a drive and certainly no zoom. Everything is extremely simple: the title, the title credits, the music (a flute sonata by Bach), the story that is told.

Hamburg student Gabriele constantly dreams of her boyfriend in Australia. The reality is different, because while she sits in lecture halls during the day, she is a dancer in a peep show at night. The place is run by the mysterious Arnold, who not only has his eye on Gabriele, but is also carrying around a secret that he soon lets Gabriele in on: his strip joint is just a pretext for a much more lucrative business, in which a certain Mrs. Lohmann is pulling the strings. Her boss Arnold, with whom she is having an affair, is doing dirty business. He is threatened by a killer because he wants out.

Film comprised of six vignettes each illustrating one aspect of life in the French capital, each set in a different area of the city.

A woman is being taken from her German hotel to be interrogated by police agents.

Story concerns two friends, Freya and Irmtraut and their relationships with the same man, Traugott, who finds it impossible to choose between the two women.

IT specialist Victor Faber makes a living securing computers for large corporations and banks. His reclusive private life is upended when he falls in love with a strange woman named Juliet. Her friend convinces Faber to exploit his knowledge to rob a bank.

On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended (1956). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Munro attempts to find him in hopes of being able to finish the film.

After finding her boss, a private detective, has committed suicide and has left her his agency, Cordelia Gray is asked to investigate the suicide of the man's son. During the course of her investigation, Cordelia becomes obsessed with the young man's memory and his increasingly suspicious death.

Two girls go to Berlin, one to find a German girl who lived at home in the 50s when her parents divorced, the other to look for a role in German cinema.

Gilbert & George are renowned for presenting themselves as ‘living sculptures,’ fusing their art and identity with the external world. Their exploration of the bleak urban surrounds of 1980’s London, powerfully evoke the desires and tensions of its disillusioned youth alongside their own eccentricities. Poetic narration combines with vivid imagery that moves between the startlingly beautiful, the humorous, and the absurd. Church spires and city streets, youth and drunks, dancing and tea-drinking all take on an affecting symbolism when viewed from the unique perspective of Gilbert & George.

At the end of the 1960s, a young woman laid the foundation of the women's movement. As well as political initiatives against male dominance, a detailed picture was drawn of society, which established the women’s motivation.

A man, alone in Berlin. He sleeps and watches TV, walks through the city. A woman approaches him. Does he feel like having coffee with her? No.

An architect is assigned to modernize a squatted house in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. But then he meets a young student who is member of a grassroots initiative trying to preserve the quarter. He falls in love with her, although this puts him into conflict with his job. Following his heart, the architect soon changes sides and supports the inhabitants in their struggle against the real estate speculators.

Director 'Nicholas Ray' is eager to complete a final film before his imminent death from cancer. Wim Wenders is working on his own film Hammett (1983) in Hollywood, but flies to New York to help Ray realize his final wish. Ray's original intent is to make a fiction film about a dying painter who sails to China to find a cure for his disease. He and Wenders discuss this idea, but it is obviously unrealistic given Ray's state of health.

A London radio DJ receives news of his brother's suicide and travels west to Bristol to find out more.

In 1978, Peter Przygodda, editor of Wim Wenders‘ films, Reinhard Hauff and Hans W. Geissendörfer, together with his Brazilian colleague Braulio Tavares Neto and Martin Schäfer at the camera, filmed the long-distance truck drivers on their journeys with heavy goods vehicles and thus obtained first-hand information. In the course of the trucker film wave ('Convoy') of the late 70s, his film was released in cinemas. Trucker life appears as a social phenomenon far removed from the romance and hero myths surrounding the adventure of the highway.

Interview film with German director Werner Herzog revisiting the films he made up to ca. 1977.

A 30-year-old returns to his hometown after several years away, where he is confronted with childhood memories, especially feelings of hatred towards his father.

Loosely adapted from Goethe's novel on the social conventions of marriage raised to level of symbolic parable.

A couple (Karin Thome and Eberhard Klasse), whose relationship can't hold up to the pressure of their financial and career problems, only have their child left as the remaining connecting link. But even their child becomes a pawn in their egoistic power games and possessiveness. The crisis reaches a peak first then, when the husband finds out about an affair that the wife is having and sets out to claim the same rights for himself. This takes him to New York, where he settles. The wife gets her hands on all the cash reserves and follows him there. In spite of the new location, they still remain a couple with a disturbed and insensitive miscommunication, that instinctively cling even more to each other in the new and alienating environment.

The experimental German krautrockers CAN's legendary "Free Concert," recorded in Cologne's Sporthalle, Germany, on February 3, 1972. The circumstances of this Cologne show were unusual. Rather improbably for such an experimental band, Can actually scored a chart success in Germany with "Spoon," which would later be tacked onto the end of Ege Bamyasi.

A former bank clerk conceives a one-man robbery at the bank he works. He had before established an alibi for himself pretending and declaring him legally dead. Further complications ensue when he rejoins his estranged wife.