Hanna Schygulla

Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

A 707 aircraft jetliner, en route from Athens to Rome and then to New York City, is hijacked by Lebanese terrorists, who demand that the pilot take them to Beirut. What the terrorists don't realize is that an elite team of commandos have been called in to eliminate all terrorists on the jetliner.

Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.

When her elderly father has a stroke, Emmanuelle rushes to his bedside. Sick and half-paralysed in his hospital bed, he asks Emmanuelle to help him end his life.

Peter von Kant, a successful, famous director, lives with his assistant Karl, whom he likes to mistreat and humiliate. Through the great actress Sidonie, he meets and falls in love with Amir, a handsome young man of modest means. He offers to share his apartment and help Amir break into the world of cinema. Several months later, Amir becomes a star. But as soon as he acquires fame, he breaks up with Peter, leaving him alone to face himself.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

A doctor in early 19th-century Germany becomes infatuated with the sister of a man he unintentionally killed and bargains with the Devil incarnate to conjure their union in exchange for his soul.

In 1949, composer Roman Strauss is executed for the murder of his wife. In 1990s Los Angeles, a detective comes across a mute amnesiac woman who is somehow linked to the Strauss murder.

In a bizarre Breton library that collects rejected, never published manuscripts, a young editor discovers a novel that she considers a masterpiece. It was written by a certain Henri Pick, a cook who died two years earlier and who, according to his widow, had never read a book in his life or written anything but a shopping list... Did he have a secret life? When the book becomes a huge best-seller, Jean- Michel Rouche, a skeptical and stubborn literary critic, teams up with Joséphine, Pick’s daughter, to unravel the mystery.

The amazing biography of legendary circus impresario and unparalleled showman, P.T. Barnum.

The life story of an 18th century womanizer who's arrested, not so much for his crimes, but because he's viewed as an undesirable by the husbands and families of the women he seduces.

The story of a German singer named Willie, who while working in Switzerland, falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert, whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert’s family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Nazi as she becomes famous for singing the song “Lili Marleen”.

The lives of six German-Turkish immigrants are drawn together by circumstance: An old man and a prostitute forging a partnership, a young scholar reconciling his past, two young women falling in love, and a mother putting the shattered pieces of her life back together.

Munir travels to a remote island to contemplate a drastic action. He is haunted by a cryptic parable passed down to him by his mother. In the silence of his isolated island sanctuary, he encounters the enigmatic Valeska and her rough-hewn but loyal son, Karl. Although few words are spoken, simple acts of kindness begin to overcome their mutual distrust. Munir’s heavy burden is gradually eased and his desire for life reignited

During the French Revolution, a surprising company shares a coach, trying to catch up something - the time itself, perhaps.

During the Spanish Civil War, a troupe of Spanish filmmakers is invited to shoot a film at UFA studios in Nazi Germany.

Six days in the life of Wilhelm: a detached man without qualities. He wants to write, so his mother gives him a ticket to Bonn, telling him to live. On the train he meets an older man, an athlete in the 1936 Olympics, and his mute teen companion, Mignon. She's an acrobat in market squares for spare change.

Petra von Kant is a successful fashion designer -- arrogant, caustic, and self-satisfied. She mistreats Marlene (her secretary, maid, and co-designer). Enter Karin, a 23-year-old beauty who wants to be a model. Petra falls in love with Karin and invites her to move in.

Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made.

Hans is a street fruit peddler and born loser. His choice of career upsets his bourgeois family, causing him to turn to drinking and violence. After recovering from a debilitating heart attack, his business finally begins to take off. However, the more he becomes a credit to his family, the more depressed he becomes.

A writer struggles with her daughter's decision to drop out of college and live on the streets.

Women were clearly at the core of legendary photographer Helmut Newton's work. The stars of his iconic portraits and fashion editorials – from Catherine Deneuve to Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling to Isabella Rossellini – finally give their own interpretation of the life and work of this controversial genius. A portrait by the portrayed. Provocative, unconventional, subversive, his depiction of women still sparks the question: were they subjects or objects?

To escape his crumbling marriage, German journalist Laschen travels to Beirut during the fights between Christians and Palestinians to produce an essay. Together with his photographer, he meets some influential people and discovers the everyday face of the war.

Piera is a young woman who grows up under the parentage of two extremely original overseers: both her mother and father have incestuous relations with her before they are committed to insane asylums. A special connection, between a mother and her daughter, full of sensuality and complicity, has allowed to portray a family full of fears, rather unbalanced, but nevertheless searching infinite love.

In a small town plunged into darkness, two children, Kyona and Adriel, are separated from their parents and, facing the path of exile alone, embark on a heroic journey that will take them from childhood to adolescence, in search of refuge, peace and the hope of finding their family.

Mavi Sürgün is a fictionalized account of one period of the life of a Turkish journalist who was condemned to exile for an article he wrote in 1925. He turned his punishment into a reward by creating a little paradise in what is today the holiday resort, Bodrum. In fact he is considered by some to be the first ecologist. The film concentrates on this latter aspect of his character and through flashbacks portrays the inner turmoil of a man who is trying to come to terms with his past. The slow pace is somewhat of a drawback, the flashbacks are often confusing and the protagonist is not always very convincing. But the photography of the country side is exceptional Kenan Ormanlar and the short appearance by a very theatrical Hanna Schygulla of Fassbinder fame adds a little spice to the drama.

Wilhelm Wilder (Will) is a talented actor stuck on a New York City children's TV show where he portrays Bad Luck Bunny, a hapless green rabbit. Feeling a failure, he bears his fate with touching self-irony, but grows sulky and petulant when he thinks that his wife, daughter and all his friends have forgotten his 40th birthday. In the confusion following a road accident, all the world believes he is dead. Instead of rectifying the situation, he decides to fulfill a fantasy and attend his own funeral. Here he will learn what everyone really thinks of him. With the aid of his best friend Rad, an Indian restaurant-owner, Will becomes Vijay Singh, a handsome and gentlemanly Sikh, complete with turban and beard. Will confronts a unique problem: everyone likes Vijay, and most of all, he likes Vijay, more than he ever liked himself.

A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon, new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos.

While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.

Two women–a literature professor and a painter–start to rely upon their friendship as an alternative to their unhappy relationships with the men in their lives.

When 17-year-old Effi Briest marries the elderly Baron von Instetten, she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is haunted. Starved for companionship, Effi begins a friendship with Major Crampas, a charismatic womanizer.

In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio's safety in insidious ways.

Film director Jeff and his lead actor are taking their time getting to set. In their absence, the crew lack a purposeful way to spend their time waiting, so they drink heavily. However, as booze is downed and frustration sets in, morale hits rock bottom.

What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is mentally ill. Her father wants to see her returned to the psychiatric clinic, but Léa refuses to see her mother in the same light: Suzanne is happy – even if she doesn’t act like others expect her to. She appears to live a joyfully infantile existence after calmly letting go of life’s pressures. Léa captures her mother’s life on film and focuses her attention on examining the old super-8 films from the family archives. When she is left to drive her mother back to the clinic after a weekend at home, Léa grabs her opportunity: She turns the car around and whisks Suzanne off on a journey; a road trip without the judgements of others. AVANTI follows a mother-daughter relationship with an ease and depth that highlights the complexity of the emotional ties within a family.

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

"Promised Land" tells the story of a group of young unwitting Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to be auctioned off as prostitutes in Israel, and of their initiation into this trade of flesh, and finally of the accidental freeing of one girl who most fight for her freedom.

Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he has refused to join.

Ernest, Ted and August fulfill their friend Carl's dying wish and take him to Heidelberg, where they all first met 45 years ago, to see his old girlfriend one last time. However, the locals won't talk about her, due to a WW2 secret.

In this improbable, ponderous story about a couple who do not want to have children of their own, and a pregnant, single woman who needs a home for awhile, the relationship between the three is strange, at the very least.

Images and sounds expose the duality of Portugal during the days of WW2: a peaceful, god-loving, rural country, providing an escape route for over one hundred thousand European refugees to the Americas; and a political and cultural elite that disguised their Nazi inclinations just enough to play its neutral role in international politics.

Technical draftsman Herr R. is a dependable guy. He gets along with his colleagues although his boss wants him to go beyond technical cleanliness to problem solving. He's a dutiful husband; his wife's a social climber and pressures him to seek a promotion, but they also share sweet moments. He's a caring father, helping his son with homework. His parents visit; his mother criticizes his wife. Old schoolmates drop by, as do neighbours. Some comment on his wife's expensive tastes. His promotion may be a long shot, especially after he gives a dull and tipsy toast at an office dinner. But why would Herr R. run amok?

Jean-Luc Godard is synonymous with cinema. With the release of Breathless in 1960, he established himself overnight as a cinematic rebel and symbol for the era's progressive and anti-war youth. Sixty-two years and 140 films later, Godard is among the most renowned artists of all time, taught in every film school yet still shrouded in mystery. One of the founders of the French New Wave, political agitator, revolutionary misanthrope, film theorist and critic, the list of his descriptors goes on and on. Godard Cinema offers an opportunity for film lovers to look back at his career and the subjects and themes that obsessed him, while paying tribute to the ineffable essence of the most revered French director of all time.

A documentary about Fassbinder and the early years of the legendary Antiteater, the group he was a member/leader of. You can here see and hear some of the actors he was going to use in his movies for the next years. The movie shows rehearsals for his play "The Coffeehouse," which also became a television movie, and you can watch unique footage from the 19th Film Festival in Berlin (1969) where "Love is Colder Than Death" was shown. As told in this documentary, his first feature movie was given a cold shoulder by many of the journalists and visitors at the festival. You can in "End of the Commune" watch Fassbinder and actor Ulli Lommel walk out on stage after the opening of "Love is Colder Than Death,” while a man in the audience is shouting "Out with the director!” In this documentary, Fassbinder also talks a lot about his father, who was a respectable doctor.

A wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.

Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.

MARIANNE (Evabritt Strandberg) is a 68-year old woman diagnosed with a terminal disease. Left with angst, she seeks therapy at a clinic where she is treated with Psilocybin (LSD) and meditation by a counselor, Eva (Hanna Schygulla). Through this she is transferred to her subconscious, where she meets and confronts her 25-year old self and her former husband.

Mrs. Forbes, a German governess, is hired for six weeks to take care of two children, while their parents are away. She is authoritarian and repressive, so the children plan to murder her. But when they spy on her during the night, they discover Mrs. Forbes' secret.

Unique archives show a world that no longer exists: pre-war Poland in which two cultures: Jewish and Polish, coexisted wall-in-wall; cottage in a cottage; town next to town. "Po-lin" - meaning "we will stop here" in Yiddish - does not deny the painful past. It only shows that there was something more next to them. Worth remembering and - perhaps - reconstruction.

An exploration of the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

Abram returns to his small village and although his repairing skills are needed, people's suspicion about his sexual preferences make his life hard.

The story of a young mother with a failed marriage behind her, who fights daily for her dream to open a hair salon, challenging her fate in an effort to free herself and gain independence and right to happiness.

The extraordinary story of Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940), creator of Nils Holgersson, a memorable and legendary literary character, and the first female storyteller to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1909); a woman as pioneering in her life as in her remarkable work.

An investigative portrait of the master of cinematic melodrama, Douglas Sirk. His life was the ultimate melodrama, from which all his films were inspired. Through the testimonies of those closest to him and the unpublished accounts in his wife's diary, we get closer to this man surrounded by mystery.

Thomas is a drug addict. In an effort to put an end to his habit, he joins a community of former addicts who live isolated in the mountains and use prayer as a way to cure themselves.

"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American Southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife, Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage: the homosexual Frank and the feeble-minded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various family members ask him to kill some of the others.

A documentary about the life and work of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Godard constructs a lyrical study of the cinematic and creative process by deconstructing the story of his 1982 film Passion. “I didn’t want to write the script,” he states, “I wanted to see it.” Positioning himself in a video editing suite in front of a white film screen that evokes for him the “famous blank page of Mallarmé,” Godard uses video as a sketchbook with which to reconceive the film. The result is a philosophical, often humorous rumination on the desire and labor that inform the conceptual and image making process of the cinema.

No description available.

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket? The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.

No description available.

An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the biblical Ruth) and her sisters, who are forced into exile after the death of their husbands. It is set in 1990s Paris, where the director was living in self-imposed exile following the ban on his 1982 documentary in Israel. The recurring theme of the film is migrations and unrooting, like the legendary Golem.

After his release from prison, ex-convict Franz Walsch finds his way back into the Munich criminal underworld. His attentions focus upon two women, Joanna and Margarethe, as well as upon Günther, his friend who earlier shot his brother.

A documentary about the director Fassbinder but edited as if it were a film of the master himself, with some sequences of his own movies.

On the Schiermoser farm tense expectation prevails. The 'Urban', the Schaubleins, surprisingly announced their arrival. In the past, they were welcome as generous summer visitors. But now the shortage years of the First World War prevail. And the farmer's wife suspects lazy parasites in the townsfolk. The city family is indeed facing ruin. Especially since the defiant daughter Rosalie has just knocked out a promising money marriage without regard to scandal. The Rosalie is attracted to the Schiermoser heir Franz. His mother already drives the thought of a 'Madame Bäurin' to madness. Everyone experiences a turbulent time of upheaval. The end of the First World War will shake the social fronts as well as the new machine age.

When Elaine, an adventurous young woman from Germany, arrives in New York City, she sets out to be a famous writer. After a brief stint at a mundane job, Elaine falls on hard times and also becomes intrigued by a mysterious stranger named Lulu. Before long, Elaine gets roped into situations involving theft, murder and the mob. Can the beleaguered expatriate with big dreams turn her life around and steer clear of crime and chaos?

Marco Ferreri: Dangerous But Necessary is a trip through the auteur's singular cosmos - at once supernatural and earthbound. He dropped out of his studies to become a veterinarian, choosing instead to concern himself principally with the human animal, in our corporeal and yearning essence.

Documentary about the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1972 German television series EIGHT HOURS DON'T MAKE A DAY, featuring interviews with actors Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann, Wolfgang Schenck, and Hans Hirschmüller.

An actor and poet falls in love with a former mortuary photographer turned waitress. They find themselves caught up way over their heads in a dirty political and financial affair, an art smuggling case that touches them merely for the fact that it may separate them, be it through death or exile.

An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."

People meet and chat at Ridolfo's Coffeehouse; the conversations are mostly about money, but also about feelings, ideals, friendship, love, fidelity and respectability.

No description available.

Magdalena Hausen was a German photographer who became known for successfully capturing a photograph of the wind. Today, fifteen years after her disappearance, there are still more questions than answers.

The film intertwines historical events and intimate memories. I observe how architecture represents the transformations of society and those who give form to this architecture. We follow the journey of Munio, my father, born in 1909 in Silesia, Poland, the son of a tenant farmer of a Prussian junker. At the age of 18, Munio goes to Berlin and Dessau to meet Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus. In 1933, the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, who accused Munio of treason against the German people. Munio was imprisoned, then deported to Basel. He left for Palestine. Upon his arrival in Haifa, he began a career as an architect and adapted European modernist principles to the Middle East.

A film portrait of the influential Bavarian actor, director, and screenwriter who publicly confessed his homosexuality, which chronologically covers all the important stages from Action-Theater to the director's early death, supplemented with anecdotes.

Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.

In a small German town, a 14-year-old girl's relationship with an older man draws scrutiny and leads to legal consequences, reflecting the constraints of their social surroundings.

Story of the owners (Mastroianni and Schygulla) of a fancy nightclub in Budapest before and during WWII.

51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father killed her mother. She bears a striking resemblance to Herbert's dead wife. They get married, but their relationship seems doomed, until gradually each one manages to penetrate the mysterious world of the other, and they begin to realize that they are bound by a kind of spiritual relationship. For Lea it is the death of her mother, for Herbert it is the death of his first wife. His hard exterior slowly beings to thaw, and he starts to show feelings and responses that soften Lea's initial hatred and fear of him, and which put their relationship in a more positive light.

Short film based on Thomas Mann's short story "Der Kleiderschrank".

Two very different love stories cross each other in warm and magical way. A humanistic and yet mysterious film about love and death near the German/Danish border.

No description available.

Adaptation of Robert Walser's novel about a young man who enters an oppressive servant school.

Nineteen people with differing degrees of visual impairment – from mild nearsightedness to total blindness – discuss how they see themselves, how they see others and how they perceive the world. Unusual images, of burning trees or empty deserts, link the interviews, which vary from deep to funny to poetic.

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "The film is a look entirely at Western decadence" - Jean-Marie Straub.

A meditation on the first 100 years of German cinema, featuring an assembly of German filmmakers.

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge.

Anna is a psychologist undertaking research about famous suicidal women. She takes a specific interest in the case of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who killed herself in 1931 in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Notes on the movie Passion

Inspired by the real-life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX century. Mathias stole from the rich to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people and a popular social rebel. He was chased by the police until his unfortunate sentence.

A documentary about the making of the television mini-series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, including interviewees with the principal actors.

This movie is about love affairs, simple pleasures of a few men and women who will gather for a few days in a villa, around a piano and the music of Gottschalk who is perhaps the main actor.

A documentary that focuses on the making of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "The Marriage of Maria Braun".

A short film made by Sirk at the end of his life with one of his students. An adaptation of Schnitzler, with Hanna Schygulla: a night of New Year’s Eve, when the family meal is finished, Hanna is in a window while a young man entertains her and talks of the one he loves but can’t join at that time.

In Paris, unhappy movie actress Catherine Crachat becomes infatuated with the mathematician Pierre Indemini, but then breaks up with him. After a film shoot in Vienna, Catherine stays with a rich admirer, Fanny Hohenstein. Fanny has a history of many lovers of both sexes, two of whom killed themselves over her.

An attempt at a psychological profile of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who answers the author's questions about his artistic and personal development in a manner that is at times shockingly laconic. Excerpts from his film "Beware of a Holy Whore" document how much the life circumstances of his group of actors influenced the work of the director.

Despite advancing age, rural businessman Franz has remained fit and energetic, but serious mental illness and financial problems mean that this hitherto ordinary man one day finds himself on a journey to Nairobi to get his money back, and perhaps his human dignity as well.

No description available.

Though he never actually worked in Hollywood, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 at the age of 36, was influenced greatly by American studio films of the 1950s and the convention of melodrama (the link most often mentioned is Douglas Sirk).

The story of Irmi Selver, who lost her family while fleeing Germany in 1939 and overcame tragedy and upheavals to establish a new life in New York.

Jack Altieri, a young Italian-American restaurant owner, arrives at Vesta awaits him a painting of the sixteenth century that depicts the veiled face of Medea of Carpi, noble woman processed to witchcraft. Shortly after the arrival of Jack, a country girl is killed in a mysterious way, dropping the suspicions of the Commissioner Gianzi on the young restorer, who is soon advised to not complete the work on the opera, because it would hide an ancient curse.

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth-century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends.