Country:Germany

Director:Straub & Huillet

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

Three sequences are linked together in this disorientingly sublime short film; 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, who is played by director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Country:Germany

Director:Wim Wenders

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Wim Wenders created his most popular film as a love letter to the cinema as much as a response to the spectre of German Romanticism. Two angels are wandering in a grave Berlin which they perceive in black and white. Invisible to humans, they nevertheless give their help to all the lonely and depressed souls they meet. After many centuries, one of the angels becomes unhappy with his immortal state and wishes to become human in order to experience the joys of everyday life. He meets a circus acrobat and finds in her the fufillment of all his mortal desires.

Country:Germany, United States of America

Director:Oscar Fischinger

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Oscar Fischinger was the unique master of a highly graphic and pristine abstract cinema form and this film illustrates quite clearly the essential parallel thought that drove Fischinger’s work from the beginning: the specific alligning of sound and image. Fischinger actually strove to make films which were completely fused to music and his images visualized the music in a painstakingly literal manner.

Country:Germany

Director:Hans Richter

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

With this film Richter combined his interest in anarchic dadaist actions with highly syncopated and rythmic film style, without relying on music. In his previous film Rythmus 21 it is apparent that the imposition of Rythym was paramount for Richter. Clocks, legs, ladders and people undergo irrational permutations in odd settings. Beards appear and disappear on faces, a man's head comes off and floats in the air, tea cups fill up by themselves, objects and characters move in reverse... .

Country:Germany

Director:Robert Weine

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

This totally unique film brought German Expressionism to the world and is best remembered for its overall look: it has all the appearance of an amusement park fun house with strangely painted sets and kanted camera angles, distorted perspectives and extreme make-up. The story is marked by several framing devices: A man relates a story in which a friend and fiancée join him at a fair where they meet Dr. Caligari, who exhibits a somnambulist, Cesare, who predicts the future. A terrible prophecy is offered which comes to pass.

Country:Germany

Director:Philip Groning

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

Groning’s powerful film is an intimate portrayal of the everyday lives of Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse, high in a remote corner of the French Alps. The film was made 16 years after the director first requested permission to make it. After this he lived at the monastery for six months, and filmed all alone, behind the walls no 'outsider' had ever been allowed to enter before. Groning has delivered a film which bears the stamp of the time, patience and experience which has gone into the endeavor and which are a crucial part of the life in a monastery.

Country:Germany

Director:Florian Henckel von Donnarsmarck

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

This film shows the horrifying but sometimes unintentionally funny system of observation in the former East Germany. In the early 1980s, the successful dramatist Georg Dreyman and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland, a popular actress, are big intellectual stars in the socialist state, although they secretly don't always think loyal to the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa, so the secret service agent Wiesler is instructed to observe and sound out the couple, but their life fascinates him more and more...

Link to IMDB.com

Country:Germany

Director:Hartmut Bitomsky

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

Dust. It is everywhere and ever present. It is the smallest, discernable subject about which to
make a film. In associative and symphonic movements, Bitomsky pursues it to the place
where it settles, and seeks out people who contend with it. Columns of cleaners in their daily
battle for cleanliness, inventors of air cleansing products, scientists who investigate the
damaging consequences of fine dust and uranium munitions from the US army’s stock of
weapons, botanists, meteorologists, astronomers and artists. Dust marks out the limits of

Link to IMDB.com

Country:Germany

Director:Brigitte Maris Bertele

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

This film collects a series of modest portraits of street children trying to survive in the Ghanian capitol of Acra. They scavenge on the waste dumps, play soccer on the beach, are bored at school, watch violent videos and rob bus passengers of their baggage. Meanwhile, Amma Darko reads fragments from her autobiographical book in which she compares the depraved situation shown here with Sodom and Gomorra. The different children, each of whom is introduced with a frozen image, have their own reasons why they have got into this situation.

Link to IMDB.com