Emil Jannings (The Last Laugh, Faust, Othello), the quintessential German expressionist actor, stars as Professor Rath, the sexually-repressed instructor of a boys' prep school. After learning of the pupils' infatuation with French postcards depicting a local nightclub songstress, he decides to personally investigate the source of such indecency. But as soon as he enters the shadowy Blue Angel nightclub and steals one glimpse of the smoldering Lola-Lola...

FLYING CLIPPER, directed by Hermann Leitner and featuring narration from Burl Ives, follows the untold adventures of a Swedish sailing ship and its young crew as they navigate the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1960s. This documentary is a stunning travelogue that takes you to the dreamiest destinations of the old world. Under the stewardship of Captain Skoglund, a group of 20 Merchant Marine cadets venture through historical landmarks, such as Tutankhamen's...

Filmmaker Rüdiger Stein wants to produce his first meaningful documentary. By chance, he meets Klaus and Manuela, two young teenagers who grew up in difficult social circumstances. They are expecting a child and plan to move in together. It’s a perfect, socially important topic for Rüdiger’s first film. But Manuela changes her mind and the project threatens to fall apart. Rüdiger feels obliged to intervene so he can save his film, but it seems...

The feared bandit COBRA VERDE (Klaus Kinski) is hired by a plantation owner to supervise his slaves. After the owner suspects Cobra Verde of consorting with his young daughters, the owner wishes him gone. Rather than kill him,the owner sends Cobra Verde to Africa. The only white man in the area, Cobra Verde finds himself the victim of torture and humiliation. Later, he trains soldiers in a rebel army. Far from home, Cobra Verde is on the edge of madness....

Eight space cargo-ships disappear without a trace within three days, and there is suddenly no contact with the orbiting space station, Margot. The space council orders a total flight stop. But one space ship secretly takes off to go to the space station. The scientist in charge, Maria Scholl, sees no other solution than to order a total flight stop to this mysterious sector of space. Her colleague, Prof. Tal, is acting suspiciously, as he knows things...

After Dammbeck’s original film project Herakles (Hercules) was rejected by the East German DEFA Studios in 1983-84, the artist was still fascinated by the Hercules story. He started experimenting with different media combinations, including overpainting, photography, film clips, collage, painting and movement. These experiments resulted in groundbreaking multi-media collaborations and in the film THE CAVE OF HERCULES, in which Dammbeck explores...

A lonely German woman ends up in the most desolate motel on Earth and decides to make it brighter.

A film about children and teenagers living in an East German CHILDREN'S HOME in Mentin, Mecklenburg in the late 1970s. They talk openly about their past experiences, how they affected their lives and why they ended up in the home, describing unstable home situations, domestic violence and their parents’ alcohol abuse. But these young people also share their hopes for the future. This documentary was produced as an opening film for Roland Gräf’s...

Alfred and Lisa decide to divorce after only a couple of months of marriage. Alfred takes a few days off to clear his head, riding through Berlin and meeting strangers; although he ultimately returns to Lisa, but the ending remains open. In East Germany's closest counterpart to early Godard, Jürgen Böttcher grasps the life of 20-year-olds in Prenzlauer Berg with social and regional exactness and translates it into a universal language. Born in '45...

Siblings Karin and Simon are visiting their parents and their little sister Clara. That evening, other relatives will be joining them for dinner. This sequence of family scenes in a Berlin flat creates a wondrous world of the everyday: Coming and going, conversations, all manner of doings, each movement leading to the next, one word following another. It is a carefully staged chain reaction of actions and sentences. And in between, silent gazes and...