Berlin: Hasenheide

KitKatClub - Das Leben ist ein Zirkus

Invalid date •German

The story of the legendary Berlin club and its founder, a woman whose life is inextricably interwoven with the bright and dark sides of a hedonistic lifestyle.

Tunnel to Freedom

July 2021 •German

13 August 1961: the GDR closes the sector borders in Berlin. The city is divided overnight. Escape to the West becomes more dangerous every day. But on September 14, 1962, exactly one year, one month and one day after the Wall was built, a group of 29 people from the GDR managed to escape spectacularly through a 135-meter tunnel to the West. For more than 4 months, students from West Berlin, including 2 Italians, dug this tunnel. When the tunnel builders ran out of money after only a few meters of digging, they came up with the idea of marketing the escape tunnel. They sell the film rights to the story exclusively to NBC, an American television station.

Jesse Owens et Luz Long : le temps d'une étreinte

June 2015 •French

Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony

February 2008 •German

Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.

Berlin Geheimoperation Tunnel

January 2011 •German

Peter Eisenman: Building Germany's Holocaust Memorial

February 2009 •English

This documentary explores the creation of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as designed by architect Peter Eisenman. Reaction of the German public to the completed memorial is also shown.

Spirit of the Games

May 1996 •English

Documentary examines the history and evolution of the Olympic Games, taking a close look at the Olympic charter, oath and ideals. Also featured are rare home movies and interviews with Olympic athletes and the oldest known color footage of the Olympic Games from Berlin in 1936.

Tangerine Dream - Signals from the Schwäbischen Strasse

May 1976 •German

German TV film, also shown on Spanish TV in 1976, this is a film all about TD which includes informal interviews and concert/studio footage, most of which seems to have been done exclusively for the film. The interviews are in the German language. The street name in the title refers to where Edgar Froese used to live in Berlin (apparently Klaus Schulze lived on the same street at the time) and is now the site of the TDI offices.

Queens Don’t Cry

February 2002 •German

Bosom buddies BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine, Ichgola Androgyn and Tima die Göttliche are four Berlin drag queens who met in the mid 1980s. These four queens became Germany’s most popular drag performers and have been busy fertilizing the German cultural scene. Besides being performers, they are also political activists – in AIDS awareness, anti-gay violence, the sex workers movement and the struggle against the extreme right and racism. The film tells their story.

Olympia 1936. Der verratene Traum

August 2016 •German

The film chronicles the story of how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual benefit, a small sports event into the modern Olympics. The grand themes and controversial issues from the 1936 Games have continued to this day: Monumentality, budget overruns, collusion with authoritarian regimes, corruption and sometimes even bribery.

Ich will da sein - Jenny Gröllmann

June 2008 •German

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

September 1927 •German

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

100 Years of the UFA

August 2017 •German

The intricate history of UFA, a film production company founded in 1917 that has survived the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, the Adenauer era and the many and tumultuous events of contemporary Germany, and has always been the epicenter of the German film industry.

The Birds and the Beasts Were There

December 1944 •English

Visits to three animal parks in Miami, Florida: the Rare Bird Farm, with it's many chickens, cranes, and other birds; the Monkey Jungle, where the visitors are caged and the simian inhabitants roam freely; and finally the Parrot Jungle.

Olmsted and America's Urban Parks

April 2011 •English

Frederick Law Olmsted designed New York City's Central Park with Calvert Vaux over 150 years ago, and it remains an undisputed haven of tranquility amidst one of the largest, tallest, and most unnatural places on earth. This film examines the creation of America's great city parks in the late 1800s through the enigmatic eyes of Frederick Law Olmsted, visionary urban planner and landscape architect. In his own words, Olmsted and America's Urban Parks weaves together Olmsted's engaging and poignant personal story with those of the lasting masterpieces he left for us today, featuring Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Kline as the voice of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Berg

April 2012 •English

BERG investigates a historical site through an alternate shift between documentary and fictional representation. A soundscape produced from samples from a series of mainstream Spy Movies overlaps a selection of classic shots, inspired by the most repetitive cinematic clichés that are to be found in the espionage genre.

Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing America

May 2014 •English

To Olmsted, a park was both a work of art and a necessity for urban life. Olmsted’s efforts to preserve nature created an “environmental ethic” decades before the environmental movement became a force in American politics. With gorgeous cinematography, and compelling commentary this film presents the biography of a man whose parks and preservation are an essential part of American life.

Partisan

February 2018 •German

Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 1992-2017. The end of the GDR gave rise to new artistic freedoms in reunited Berlin. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, rebel director Frank Castorf was appointed artistic director of the Volksbühne. His way of working altered the public’s perception of this theater. The chronological history of the Castorf era between 1992 and 2017 is told here in excerpts from the productions and in a series of conversations conducted on the long sofa in the theater's foyer.

The First World War

November 1934 •English

Produced by the Fox Movietone News arm of Fox Film Corporation and based on the book by Lawrence Stallings, this expanded newsreel, using stock-and-archive footage, tells the story of World War I from inception to conclusion. Alternating with scenes of trench warfare and intimate glimpses of European royalty at home, and scenes of conflict at sea combined with sequences of films from the secret archives of many of the involved nations.

Central Airport THF

February 2018 •German

A documentary about Berlin's former airport Tempelhof. A film about Departures and Arrivals. And about those Berliners who come here to escape from their daily lives and those refugees who came here to finally arrive somewhere.