Kopfschuß (1981)

Copying Beethoven

A fictionalised exploration of Beethoven's life in his final days working on his Ninth Symphony. It is 1824. Beethoven is racing to finish his new symphony. However, it has been years since his last success and he is plagued by deafness, loneliness and personal trauma. A copyist is urgently needed to help the composer. A fictional character is introduced in the form of a young conservatory student and aspiring composer named Anna Holtz. The mercurial Beethoven is skeptical that a woman might become involved in his masterpiece but slowly comes to trust in Anna's assistance and in the end becomes quite fond of her. By the time the piece is performed, her presence in his life is an absolute necessity. Her deep understanding of his work is such that she even corrects mistakes he has made, while her passionate personality opens a door into his private world.

Nowhere in Africa

A Jewish woman named Jettel Redlich flees Nazi Germany with her daughter Regina, to join her husband, Walter, on a farm in Kenya. At first, Jettel refuses to adjust to her new circumstances, bringing with her a set of china dishes and an evening gown. While Regina adapts readily to this new world, forming a strong bond with her father's cook, an African named Owuor.

When Saturday Comes

Jimmy Muir comes from a typical gritty, northern town where there are only two options: working down the pit or in a factory. But Jimmy has other ideas - he dreams of becoming a professional footballer. Confronted by a bitter and unsupportive father, hard drinking friends and a lifetime of bad habits...has Jimmy the will to achieve his ultimate goal?

A Real Young Girl

Bored and restless, Alice spends much of her time lusting after Jim, a local sawmill worker. When not lusting after him, Alice fills the hours with such pursuits as writing her name on a mirror with vaginal secretions and wandering the fields with her underwear around her ankles. And, in true teenaged tradition, she spends a lot of time writing in her diary.

Whale Rider

A contemporary story of love, rejection, and triumph as a young Maori girl fights to fulfill a destiny her grandfather refuses to recognize.

Elevator to the Gallows

A self-assured businessman murders his employer, the husband of his mistress, which unintentionally provokes an ill-fated chain of events.

The Story of the Weeping Camel

When a Mongolian nomadic family's newest camel colt is rejected by its mother, a musician is needed for a ritual to change her mind.

Frida

A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

Amélia

Fictional story based on Sarah Bernhard's visit to Brazil in 1905. The actress, experiencing a personal and professional crisis at the time, is induced by her personal Brazilian maid, Amélia, to make a performance in Rio de Janeiro. After arriving, she is forced to stand the company of Amélia's exotic sisters.

The Blue Wave

Deniz and her friends, who have been apart for the summer, have much to tell each other. While adults are busy with their professional lives, Deniz and her friends are still confused about their university plans. Through the worries of their daily routines, they make plans for the future, yet the challenges of teenage years/adolescence are burdensome. Deniz desires a life that is different than the ideals of her friends. A song nobody has heard of, a hopeless love, solitude. A different world, but where exactly?

Saint Louis Blues

This sweet musical takes us on a cross-country trip through Senegal, from Dakar to Saint Louis in a battered taxi, as passengers sing their stories.

Parks

Jun is a university student. She meets high school student Haru. Haru is looking for Sachiko, the ex-girlfriend of her now deceased father. Jun and Haru meet Tokio. Tokio is the grandson of Sachiko and they learn that Sachiko is now deceased. They find an open-reel tape from Sachiko's articles.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

Single dad Richard meets Christine, a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt to start a romance, but Richard’s divorce has left him emotionally damaged. Meanwhile, Richard’s sons—one a teenager, the other 6-years-old—take part in clumsy experiments with the opposite sex.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

The little nomad girl, Nansal, finds a baby dog in the Mongolian veld, who becomes her best friend - against all rejections of her parents. A story about a Mongolian family of nomads - their traditional way of life and the rising call of the City.

Take My Eyes

One winter night, Pilar runs away from home. With her, she takes only a few belongings and her son, Juan. Antonio soon sets out to look for her. He says Pilar is his sunshine, and what's more, "She gave him her eyes"...

The Virgin Suicides

A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents.

Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls

Anne and Tom, a married nudist couple, work in a real estate office. When the agency's owner discovers that Tom is a nudist, he fires him. Unfortunately, Tom was just ready to close a big real-estate deal with Al Jenkins. Tom goes to his favorite nudist camp to take his mind off his problems and discovers that Al Jenkins is also a member of the nudist camp. Together they come up with a plan to get Tom's wife and their boss to get to the nudist camp so they can close the deal.

The Garden

In the summer of 1976, a shared family yard becomes the setting, as the adults bicker over selling the garden and the kids are free to explore the mysterious neighboring lot. Then they hear about a girl that has disappeared...

Fires Within

A Cuban emigre, living in Miami and involved in an affair with the American seaman who rescued her and her daughter years earlier, must face her husband after he is unexpectedly released from a Cuban prison.

Poem of the Sea

A Soviet dam project means that many old Ukrainian villages will end up under water. There are conflicts between the dam engineers and villagers who don't want to move.

The Wagner-Clan

After the death of genius Richard Wagner his wife Cosima fights for his legacy even against the will of her children Sigmund and Sieglinde.

Signature Move

A secret new romance with Alma forces Zaynab to confront her complicated relationship with her recently widowed mother. In this coming-of-age Muslim melodrama, Zaynab copes by taking up Lucha-style wrestling.

Nothing Special

A young and successful insurance underwriter must allow her mentally unstable mother to move in with her after the institution in which the mother had been living is deemed unfit for occupancy. The mother then begins to dislike how close her daughter is with her boss.

Helen

On the outside, Helen has it all – a loving family and a successful career – but when her suppressed mental illness resurfaces, the world crumbles around her. Crippled by depression, Helen finds solace through her friendship with Mathilda, a kindred spirit struggling with bipolar disorder.

Naked

Nackt is the story of three couples, one of which just broke up, one that seems to be about to and one perfectly okay. They are all friends and from time to time they gather to talk about everything.One time they gather for dinner at the second couple's "mansion" - the husband became rich with his business. We see each couple as they prepare themselves for the party and learn a lot about their relationships.At the dinner they get to talking about recognizing each other's peer with closed eyes and decide to try it (thus the title "Nackt"=naked in German).

Murder, My Sweet

After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.

In My Skin

Esther's life is panning out nicely. She will soon move in with her boyfriend Vincent and she seems set to get a permanent position at the public relations company where she freelances. All would be fine if Esther didn't accidentally discover a piercing curiosity about her own body.

The Secret

Marie, who works as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, has been married to her husband Francois for 12 years and has a two-year-old son. Though she is relatively content with her life, she feels something is wanting. Enter 50-year old African-American Bill. Initially she is annoyed by his insouciance, but she finds that she is irresistibly attracted to him. Soon the two are in the midst of sordid illicit affair. She knows little about her new lover, and he seems uninterested in learning about her, but the long sessions of lovemaking are something else entirely. Feeling out of control, Marie is increasingly repelled by her own actions. Psychologically, she struggles to reconcile her torrid encounters with Bill and mundane domestic chores such as bathing her son. Moreover, she finds herself incapable of hiding her adulterous behavior, rather she comes home with scratches and hickeys all over her body, to the devastation Francois.

The Firefly

After her estranged brother's sudden death, young wife Lucia bonds with his fiancée through their shared grief and finds herself falling in love.

Firefly

Emotionally withdrawn strip club dancer Ayako has never recovered from her mother's suicide when she was young. She begins a relationship with patient potter Daiji, but leaves him behind when she quits her job and returns to her home town after a 10 year absence.

The Death of Empedocles

Film adaptation by Straub and Huillet of Hölderlin’s 1798 tragedy on the symbolic death of Empedocles, the legislator in Ancient Greece.

My Father and I

After Xiao Yu's mother died in an accident, she moved back to live with her birth father who she knows little about. Gradually, they grew to know each other and to accept each other for who they are.

Frisky

Two twenty-somethings move to San Francisco to chase their career, but end up chasing tail instead.

Riddance

Jutka, a young woman who works in a factory, falls in love with Andras, a university student. She pretends to be a student, to him and to his parents, and begins to live a lie. Finally she rebels against Andras and his demands and the social conventions that forced her to live a lie.

Black Sin

A companion piece to the earlier film ‘The Death of Empedocles’, 'Black Sin' is an adaptation of the third version of Friedrich Hölderlin’s play ‘Der Tod Des Empedokles’.

The Python

An absurdist farce centering around a school in post-Soviet Latvia. After a rather disgusting prank (someone defecates in the school attic), the tyrannical headmistress deems that no one can leave until the culprit is caught. When the photographer's pet python escapes, havok breaks loose.

Heat

An idealistic high school graduate goes to work on a state farm on the Kazakh steppe, only to clash with its authoritarian leader.

Discovering Ella

The (mostly) true story of the greatest jazz drummer you've never heard of who stumbled upon a 16-year-old singer and nurtured her into a legend.

The Year of Spectacular Men

In the year after graduating college, Izzy struggles to navigate the seemingly incessant failures of adulthood, the reality of a substandard dating pool and a debilitating fear of top-sheets, all in between X-Files marathons. Comically unsuccessful in love over the course the year, including five half-hearted relationships with astoundingly self-centered men, Izzy resigns herself to the support of her mother and sister, who are struggling with their own relationship problems. Seeing herself in them, Izzy gradually gains the confidence to be honest and vulnerable.

I Like Movies

Socially inept 17-year-old cinephile Lawrence Kweller gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his older female manager.

Olivia

"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.

Domenica

Police inspector Sciarra, struggling with an identity crisis, and Domenica, an orphan who would like to know about her mother, spend one day together along the streets of Naples. It's Sciarra's last day of work and he has to take Domenica to the morgue, to identify a man who might have raped her. To Domenica, Sciarra is a father she never had, to him she is the daughter he couldn't have.

Swept from the Sea

The film tells the story of Russian emigree and the only survivor from ship crash Yanko Goorall and servant Amy Foster in the end of 19th century. When Yanko enters a farm sick and hungry after the shipwreck, everyone is afraid of him, except for Amy, who is very kind and helps him. Soon he becomes like a son for Dr. James Kennedy and romance between Yanko and Amy follows.

The Last Mistress

Secrets, rumors and betrayals surround the upcoming marriage between a young dissolute man and virtuous woman of the French aristocracy.

Anatomy of Hell

A woman employs a gay man to spend four nights at her house to watch her when she's "unwatchable".

The Mourning Forest

A young woman working at a retirement home takes an elderly man living there on an excursion into the countryside, but the two wind up stranded in the titular forest.

Persepolis

In 1970s Iran, Marjane 'Marji' Satrapi watches events through her young eyes and her idealistic family of a long dream being fulfilled of the hated Shah's defeat in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However as Marji grows up, she witnesses first hand how the new Iran, now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, has become a repressive tyranny on its own.

National Theatre Live: War Horse

Based on Michael Morpurgo's novel and adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, War Horse takes audiences on an extraordinary journey from the fields of rural Devon to the trenches of First World War France.

Iris

After the failure of her marriage, Iris goes back to her hometown during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), where she becomes a war photographer.

Earth Mama

A pregnant single mother, with two children in foster care, embraces her Bay Area community as she fights to reclaim her family.

Kissing Candice

Candice longs to escape the boredom of her seaside town, but when a boy she dreams about turns up in real life, she becomes involved with a dangerous local gang.

The Souvenir

A shy but ambitious film student falls into an intense, emotionally fraught relationship with a charismatic but untrustworthy older man.

The Souvenir: Part II

In the aftermath of her tumultuous relationship with a charismatic and manipulative older man, Julie begins to untangle her fraught love for him in making her graduation film, sorting fact from his elaborately constructed fiction.

Boys

Fed up with boarding school and frustrated with the way others have planned his life, John Baker Jr. wants a change -- anything to shake up his staid routine. The moment arrives when he stumbles upon a woman, Patty Vare, unconscious in a field. Deciding to risk it, John takes her to his dorm to look after her, much to the disapproval of his friends. John's decision proves fateful as he and Patty grow close to one another. However, she may be keeping secrets from him.

My Rainy Days

Because of her past, 17-year-old Rio lives her days filling the emptiness in her heart with money--until one day, she meets a university professor named Kouki and falls in love.

The Bread, My Sweet

Dominic works round the clock: nights making biscotti for his family's bakery in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Pittsburgh, then days downtown where he's a specialist in firing people at a company that negotiates mergers. He's thrown for a loop with he learns that Bella, an elderly neighbor who's his family's closest friend, has but a few months to live. All her life, she's saved money in coffee cans for her daughter, Lucca's, wedding, but Lucca is off in foreign lands, initially as a Peace Corps volunteer, and doesn't need a man. Dominic vows to bring Lucca home and convince her to marry him to fulfill Bella's most fervent wish. What will Lucca say?

Stranger Inside

After a stint in a juvenile detention center, Treasure is transferred to an adult prison where her mother, whom she has never met, is also imprisoned. Before long, Treasure encounters Brownie, a lifer and gang leader. Brownie reveals that she is Treasure's mother, and takes the girl under her wing, protecting her from the dangers of hardcore prison life. But some women in Brownie's gang resent Treasure's presence, leading to violent conflict.

Crazylove

Letty Mayer, young and beautiful, has a cherished job as a teacher, a successful attorney boyfriend, and a tight knit family that is excited about her sister's impending wedding. But inside Letty there¹s an anxiety that¹s building. Suddenly the pressure of Letty's world overwhelms her and she suffers a devastating nervous breakdown. Institutionalized, she meets Michael, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of hospitals his entire life. Although major obstacles exist, Letty and Michael throw caution to the wind to pursue an intense new love as Letty finds herself torn between a safe past and a daring future...