Mark Waschke

Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter faces the threat of execution for refusing to fight for the Nazis during World War II.

Exiled to a rural clinic in 1980s East Germany for seeking an exit visa, a disillusioned doctor maintains a guarded distance from her colleagues, unsure if the kindly head physician is a genuine ally or a Stasi informant.

A man and a woman at an art exhibition share a fleeting moment of attraction, which neither can act upon. Days later, a chance second meeting leads to an innocent coffee and the two strangers – both married - toy with their unexplainable fascination for each other. Svenja is curious and finds herself in a hotel room with Roland, but she does not consummate an affair. A powerful executive at the large bank where Svenja's husband works, Roland is used to getting what he wants. He manipulates the transfer of her husband to Indonesia to replace a recently murdered bank manager. Unaware of Roland’s actions, Svenja now ceases to resist...

To escape mounting tensions at the advertising agency they co-own, French-German couple Nina and Jan whisk their kids, Max and Emma, away to their seaside vacation home. The couple has signed a new politically charged client, forcing them to confront their clashing priorities. But what’s meant to be an idyllic off-season retreat turns sinister when burglars tear through the house, unseen by anyone except Nina. Though at first the aftermath brings the family closer, it’s short-lived once Max reveals he glimpsed his father hiding during the break-in. As the police investigate and the evidence doesn’t add up, the account of what took place begins to unravel alongside the couple’s faith in each other.

The story of a married but separated couple Matthias and Anna, although the wounds are still open, together planning the birthday-party of their son Lukas. When, at the end of the party, little guest Julius isn't picked up by his parents, a rapid chain of events take place.

Mid-19th-century, Baltic Sea port city of Lubeck, Germany. Follows the fourth generation of the Buddenbrook mercantile family as Tony and Thomas reach the age of marriage. Fatefully impeded every step of the way, the Buddenbrooks struggle as economic hardship and personal defeats weigh down family relations.

A story set in a small village in Sudetenland between 1937 and 1945. "Habermann" is based on true events.

During the summer vacations, the three friends are about to take a trip together to Romania, where they are allowed to complete an internship on the film set of "Dracula Rises", arranged for them by Peter's father, who is responsible for the special effects during the filming. No sooner do they arrive in Transylvania than mysterious events begin to pile up at Countess Codrina's old castle, which serves as the original setting for the film. The three detectives want to find out what all this may have to do with a boy who has been missing for over 50 years, a mysterious brotherhood and an enigmatic undead. Soon, not only the filming and Peter's relationship with his father are at stake, but also the friendship of the three investigators.

Based on the best-selling psychology book by Paul Watzlawick, the film tells the story of Tiffany Blechschmid, a neurotic, moony, superstitious, contradictory and, no surprises here, single young woman in her late-twenties.

Henriette lives alone in a luxurious old apartment in Wiesbaden, which she inherited from her parents. Her everyday life is as quiet and orderly as the large rooms around her. She works as a teacher at a nearby ballet school. She regularly writes letters to a composer whom she admires but has never met in person and spends her evenings with friends who are actually her parents' friends. A chance encounter jolts Henriette out of her quiet life: she observes Felix, who is deaf and mute, stealing money in a café that was meant for the waiter. When she speaks to him on the train shortly afterwards, it is the beginning of an unusual relationship full of contrasts and unspoken passion.

Juliane's happiness seems perfect. She is head over heals in love and has just begun a new life with August. One morning, however, she wakes up to find that she has been unexplainable thrown back into her past - to the time before she met her new love. Is what seems at first glance a cruel setback in reality actually a second chance?

Naomi, an Israeli Mossad agent, is sent to Germany to protect Mona, a Lebanese informant recovering from plastic surgery to assume her new identity. Together for two weeks in a quiet apartment in Hamburg, the relationship that develops between the two women is soon exposed to the threat of terror that is engulfing the world today. In this game of deception, beliefs are questioned, choices are made, and their fate takes a surprising turn.

When a crown rolled in front of his hooves, Louis, a sheep among other sheep, grabs it, puts it on and becomes king. From then on, he plays through everything that kings do to banish boredom and to demonstrate power. With a lot of humour, historical borrowings and a profound sense, the detailed stop-motion animation drives abuse of power to extremes in order to expose it.

Where do we go when everyone wants their country back? A film about collective guilt and what remains between two people when an entire nation looks away.

Isn’t the trajectory of a shared life determined in advance? Get married, have kids, be like everyone else… According to Dietrich Brüggemann, who competed in Vary six years ago, 30-somethings conceivably have it all, yet they fail in their attempts to achieve their set ideals. Nö delivers a critique of contemporary values, while also highlighting the struggle to find and nurture love.

A married woman runs a successful gallery and falls for a man she met accidentally.

Daniel gets jostled on a crowded street and imagines teaching the stranger some manners. For Marie, a first date is one thing above all else: pure stress! What if he notices how disturbed she is...? Robert sees the other parents at the playground and is overcome with self-doubt. Alone in her room at night, Yara hears strange noises—a monster or her mom? Karsten is in the fast lane. Whoever slows down loses. Agathe seeks inner peace after a breakup, but the anger remains. And Lenny dreams of Mo, his idol—and of finally being seen.

No description available.

Some call it a men's holiday, the other flee from themselves: Thomas, Jens and Malte have rented a holiday home on a secluded Swedish lake - the complete contrast to life at home. They are only partially satisfied with that for different reasons. One is around 40, the first interim balance revealed weak points. But even in the Swedish forest, where there are at least one moose in addition to the free-running men, the guys catch up on the reality quickly. Because the wasteland is not as gullible as hoped ...

A dark psychological thriller, A Pact tells the twisted story of a contentious love triangle. As teenagers, Paul tricked Georg into handing over his girlfriend Anna to him. Georg agrees, on the condition that he can have her back whenever he wishes. After decades of silence, when Anna and Paul have a family together, Georg suddenly re-appears. Strange things start happening to Paul, and it soon becomes clear that Georg has not forgotten the pact.

In the idyllic river landscape of the Elbe, two sets of parents share a farm and the upbringing of their children. When 12-year-old Aaron disappears during a summer festival, unresolved conflicts within the community come to light: the boy is struggling at school, and the adults must also face up to their own lies and crises.

36-year-old Birgit desires nothing more than an intact family. Since she lives with her husband Andreas, the common child Philip and Sarah, her daughter from a previous, failed relationship in solid economic conditions in a terraced house, she feels very close to her ideal. Through Sarah's puberty, the family is put to the test. But Birgit believes that luckily only the formal confirmation of the adoption of Sarah by Andreas is missing.

In the second part of the crime series about star lawyer Anna Conti and public prosecutor Henry Mahn, the two women are once again fighting for law and justice on different sides. After Conti has found her way back into professional life with her last case, she now takes on the defense of a dazzling client: Frank Stolpe has led a double life for years and has now committed a bank robbery for which he appears to have no motive. Curious and fascinated at the same time, Conti tries to find out all the facets of this mysterious man with the help of her assistant Carlo. What can she believe about him? Henry Mahn, on the other hand, sees him as a pathological swindler who uses his manipulative skills to plunge others into misfortune.

Sebastian (Mark Waschke) is a physics professor at the University of Jena and dealing for years with parallel universes. Meticulously, he tries to prove its existence scientifically. His college friend Oskar (Stipe Erceg), professor of theoretical physics at CERN in Geneva, smiles at Sebastian's firm belief in parallel universes and the many-worlds theory. In order to devote himself to the evidence in peace, Sebastian brings his son Nick to a summer camp, while his wife Maike (Bernadette Heerwagen) is on vacation in the mountains. At a rest stop Nick disappears out of the car and so for Sebastian a nightmare begins. Increasingly he is loosing more and more control. What really happened? It is fatal to his own theory? And who is this mysterious Schilf, which occurs abruptly in Sebastian's life?

As a divorced father of two teenage daughters, with a head-strong ex-wife for a best friend, too many peculiar patients to keep up with and a new dog, psychotherapist Max certainly doesn't need another challenge. But when Sophie, a compulsive gambler with a boyfriend problem, regularly shows up late for her appointments, she rocks his world in ways he's not ready for.

Lukas Geier, now a popular pop musician, lives a secluded life high above the Gastein Valley in the Austrian mountains. The former detective inspector used to give people new identities, always operating in secret. Now the past is catching up with him in the form of contract killer Roland Büttner.

A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more.

Three loners from Sitges, Berlin and Amsterdam try to blend together in Brussels, city of unification.

Julian is a psychiatric patient and wants to walk from Berlin to southern Germany. He believes that through the power of walking he can heal his friend's father, who has died of a heart condition. First, he runs into Ju, a young doctor, who he soon meets again by chance. She feels unhappy, searches for her heart and spontaneously joins the likeable dreamer on his way to Tuttlingen, where the sick man lives. In a tourist resort, they are joined by a frustrated wife and mother.

Shortly before her 40th birthday, the successful surgeon Anne May is plagued by self-doubt: Actually, she would have to be satisfied, since she has long been married to her childhood sweetheart Peter and has built up a working family life with him. Nevertheless, Anne is deeply unhappy. When her husband is on a business trip, she meets Carolin Winter, the mother of a school friend of her son. Quickly, the two women make friends, Anne gets carried away by the joie de vivre of the native Chilean.

A story about of one of the darkest periods in German history, an era in which the belief in occult forces was widespread. In Bamberg, witch hunts were fostered by a greedy and delusional Bishop Prince and reached their peak around 1630. This Bamberg ruler used the witch trials to purge his political enemies and enrich himself with their goods. Almost 1000 innocent men, women and children became his victims. BURNING SOULS deals with the era seen through the eyes of Johanna Wolff, a pharmacist's daughter, and the young physician Cornelius Weinmann. To save the innocent, he and a few courageous men revolt against the Bishop Prince.

The film starts with the main character Laura, a young woman with advanced cancer, entering quite upset the home of her parents and claiming to have stopped chemo therapy and having left her husband. The worried parents call the other three adult daughters into the house and they arrive one by one. For the first time in 6 years the entire family is united again. The characters are drawn as tensions rise from old conflicts and as the situation sinks in that Laura might be terminally ill. The movie eventually shifts from a lively sometimes comical beginning into the serious theme of dying and does handle this quite tactfully and moving. While the film touches on many areas surrounding death (including religion, graveyard, care, eutanasia) the main focus is on the transformation of the characters that are thrown out of their busy lifes into this situation, eventually accepting it and dealing with it.

Anja Altmann disappears after a birthday party. When the police ask husband Thomas about her , family attorney and friend Lavinia Bertok manage to dispel any suspicions about him. But soon Thomas is arrested. While the Altmann family start hurling accusations and recriminations at each other, Anja allegedly surfaces in Spain, raising a strange suspicion against Lavinia.

Teenage siblings Hannah and Timotheus grow up in a strict evangelical family and lead seemingly fulfilling lives in their free church community. When Hannah falls in love with their new neighbour, Max, and Timotheus discovers he is attracted to men, their feelings collide with their family's values.

In the 1980s, an Israeli refugee, deemed a traitor, coaches West Germany's basketball team.

ENT doctor Katrin Schwitters meets a charming stranger on a training trip who brazenly introduces himself as a Russian secret agent. Due to a storm, the two are stranded on an island in the North Sea and spend a wondrously playful evening together. Katrin also slips into the role of an agent on a secret mission - "real" life is left out of this exciting flirtation.

Judith decides to go on her own to the salsa-dancing night, even though her boyfriend, with whom she goes there every week, can’t accompany her. A stranger, with whom she briefly dances, offers to walk her home. Next morning, upon returning home, Judith refuses at first to accept that she’s a rape victim, but in the end decides to go to a doctor and press charges - which prove inadequate to have the rapist convicted. Under the influence of sweeping bodily and mainly psychological oscillations, Judith decides she has to follow an unorthodox path in order to prove the perpetrator’s guilt.

On a Berlin construction site, the former editor-in-chief Karin and her journalist Rommy happens to witness a fatal accident. From Taras, the accident victim's brother, they learn that this is not an isolated coincidence: The Eastern European workers who toil on the construction site for cheap wages have to do their day's work under the most precarious conditions and beyond give a large part of their wages to shady "intermediaries".

In the castle park of Ludwigslust lies a dead woman. Investigators encounter a wall of silence. Everyone knew the dead "Lulu", many have a motive, everyone is afraid. But from what? Sophia Eichstätt, analyst at the LKA Kiel, investigates in the case, which assumes ever larger dimensions. Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim? Sophia gets caught between the fronts and has to decide which side she's on. It is dangerous on both sides.

Bella Figura is a play where the stage direction "flottement" (a suspension, indeterminacy, or oscillation) occurs frequently, indicating a moment of silence when the characters and audience are left in ambiguous tension. The playwright Yasmina Reza wrote Bella Figura specifically for the Schaubühne director Thomas Ostermeier, and I imagine that she included these floating silences with him in mind.

A young couple moves to a gated community (named Sechzehneichen), where soon the creative wife (a photographer) gets bored and the husband joins a secret mens' club. All the other wives seem strangely conservative and shallow. Basically a thinly veiled take on the Stepford Wives, just without any bit of humor or atmosphere, but instead filled with the sterile, unflinching and dry seriousness that makes watching a lot of our German films such a drag and a miserable experience.

It is a story about the Soviet worker Pyotr and the German engineer Hans, who came to the USSR before the war on a business trip. At a Soviet plant the German team works in cooperation with Russian specialists. Once Hans makes a mistake which causes the explosion of the furnace and human losses. Hans finds himself at the mercy of Pyotr, the only witness to his actions near the furnace. Pyotr also depends on Hans, because Pyotr’s very presence near the furnace entails accusation of subversive actions and a death sentence. Mutual suspicion gives way to silent sympathy and later friendship. They even look like each other, both have small children. Pyotr secretly leaves the town with his family but Hans feels loss rather that relief at the disappearance of the embarrassing witness.

In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.

Financial advisor Nadja Trenkler and housewife Susanne Lasko look like twin sisters. When they happen to run into each other in the elevator one day, Nadja suggests to her doppelgänger that they occasionally switch places for a fee.

The life of German photographer Fred Stein, whose street scenes from 1930s Paris and 1940s New York are well known. While caught up in the darkness of World War II, Fred Stein creates thousands of photographs.

No description available.

A violent supermarket incident involving a refugee in East Germany is reenacted in a film studio. Ten citizens observe and comment on the case, which highlights the blurred distinction between civil courage and vigilante justice.

A policeman leads a well-ordered life with his wife and 18-year-old daughter. The apparent idyll is abruptly shattered when the daughter is linked to the murder of two police officers, both colleagues of the father. While the daughter remains resolutely silent about the accusations while in custody, the father sees the illusion of his intact family fade more and more.

Gerrit Frings is facing ruin at the age of 34. After the end of his company and the suicide of his partner Markus, he is also sued by his widow Sandra. Allegedly, Gerrit owes Markus a lot of money. In reality, however, it was the other way around and his self-denial of his own situation was ultimately the reason for Markus' suicide. Gerrit's wife Claudia supports him in this difficult situation. But Gerrit falls in love with Sandra, of all people.

Oliver, former European champion in the decathlon, came out after the end of his sporting career and divorced his wife Carolin. Since then he has had little connection to his 15-year-old daughter Alma. Oliver now lives in Hamburg with Felix, the owner of an outdoor shop. When Oliver's ex-wife dies after a car accident, Alma moves in with them at the request of her aunt Franziska. Full of mistrust of her homosexual father, the traumatized girl tries to initiate conflicts between Oliver and Felix and to break them up. Alma's friend Johannes also has reservations about gays. His family provides Alma with emotional support. Because Felix also shows a lot of understanding for Alma's needs, Oliver gets caught between the fronts.

Once upon a time there was a girl called Helene. And because her father was king and her mother queen, she had to be a princess.