02 Feb 2021
How did Nazi Germany, from limited natural resources, mass unemployment, little money and a damaged industry, manage to unfurl the cataclysm of World War Two and come to occupy a large part of the European continent? Based on recent historical works of and interviews with Adam Tooze, Richard Overy, Frank Bajohr and Marie-Bénédicte Vincent, and drawing on rare archival material.
05 Oct 1993
The army of the GDR, called NVA had not survived the reunification of Germany, it was completely absorbed by the Bundeswehr and scrapped subsequently. But what apparently went on so smoothly as a peaceful unification of hostile brothers quietly left deep scars in the East German landscape.
09 Oct 2019
In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin color is merely a coincidence. As a teenager, she accidentally discovers the truth. Years before, a group of African men came to study in a village nearby. Sigrid, an East German woman, fell in love with Lucien from Togo and became pregnant. But she was already married to Armin. The child is Togolese-East German filmmaker Ines Johnson-Spain. In interviews with Armin and others from her childhood years, she tracks the astonishing strategies of denial her parents, striving for normality, developed following her birth. What sounds like fieldwork about social dislocation becomes an autobiographical essay film and a reflection on themes such as identity, social norms and family ties, viewed from a very personal perspective.
29 Oct 2023
No overview found
09 Oct 2025
The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR-FRG. Courageous, self-confident and emancipated: female industry workers talk about gaining autonomy.
29 Nov 2003
Hard, harder, hardest! This film orders you from the start to turn up the volume and pay attention. "Look out! We're Coming to Get You!" is a flood of images driven by a tempest of guitars. The film's creators jam 20 years of German music history into 120 minutes of film. Musicians from BLIND PASSENGERS, DIE SKEPTIKER, SANDOW and other bands explode their way through the film. Fans of the DEFA documentary "Flüstern und Schreien" ("Whisper and Shout") already know the stars of that film, Aljoscha, Paul and Flake of the band Feeling B. Here they have a chance to see how these musicians survived the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the "escalation of possibilities" that came with it. And you're allowed to laugh, too!
20 Dec 1974
Many times during his presidency, Lyndon B. Johnson said that ultimate victory in the Vietnam War depended upon the U.S. military winning the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people. Filmmaker Peter Davis uses Johnson's phrase in an ironic context in this anti-war documentary, filmed and released while the Vietnam War was still under way, juxtaposing interviews with military figures like U.S. Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland with shocking scenes of violence and brutality.
23 Sep 2022
Celebrated author and Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin tackles the myth that the NFL was somehow free of politics before Colin Kaepernick and other Black NFL players took a knee.
16 Nov 2011
A shocking political exposé, and an intimate ethnographic portrait of Pacific Islanders struggling for survival, dignity, and justice after decades of top-secret human radiation experiments conducted on them by the U.S. government.
02 Oct 2019
No overview found
14 Sep 1984
Nine very private encounters with different people of the post-war generation and their memories of childhood and youth. Among others, the guitarist and singer Peter "Caesar" Gläser and the actress Christine Harbort. Roland Steiner asked his contemporaries about - "What we remember ...". All interviewees are as old as the state they live in. Nine CVs from the GDR are described. They have different professions, from skilled worker and scientist, nurse and saleswoman, actress or rock musician, even a minstrel is included. They remember what shaped them: Family, school, birthdays and hot summers, the happy moments and their own failures.
02 Apr 2012
Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.
28 Oct 2020
At Hotel Astoria, the former hotspot of Leipzig, guests were served champagne and turtle soup while the Stasi listened in. Animated memories from times gone by.
14 Feb 2013
An anti-western propaganda film about the influences of American visual and consumption culture on the rest of the world, as told from a North Korean perspective.
07 Feb 2004
A film on the surveillance and the control in East Germany also speaks about it - representing extreme and almost unbelievable image of a society which has acquired one super-narrative and developed a system which makes it impossible to even speak about the possibility of anything outside it.
01 Sep 1993
Beyond Citizen Kane (1993) is a British documentary film directed by Simon Hartog, produced by John Ellis, and broadcast on Channel 4. It details the dominant position of the Rede Globo media group in the Brazilian society, discussing the group's influence, power, and political connections. Globo's president and founder Roberto Marinho came in for particular criticism, being compared with fictional newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, created by Orson Welles for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. According to the documentary, Marinho's media group engages in the same Kane wholesale manipulation of news to influence the public opinion.
29 Nov 1988
This first co-production between the GDR and Great Britain is intended to contribute to an understanding of the situation and attitudes of millions of working people in opposing social orders. Using the example of shipyard workers, fishermen, the brigade and family of a trade union active cook and unemployed person of various ages and professions in Newcastle on the one hand and a brigade of crane operators of the Warnowwerft and fishermen of the Warnemünde cooperative on the other hand, insights into the way of life and attitudes of people of our time are to be conveyed.
02 Jun 2020
In the midst of the transition towards reunification and a market economy, two teams meet for the last time in the final of the FDGB Cup shortly after the 1990 Volkskammer elections: favorites Dynamo Dresden and Polizeisportverein Schwerin. Matthias Hufmann and Benjamin Unger take a look back 30 years later.
27 May 2022
A documentary that explores questions of secrecy and power in relation to the East German Secret Police (the 'Stasi') within East German society. The film is based upon key findings from an extensive research project, 'Knowing the Secret Police', and reflects upon how different kinds of knowledge were circulated through social, religious, political and literary networks within the former GDR. The filmmakers present this research with footage filmed at key locations throughout East Berlin and the wider surrounding landscape, including the Stasi archives and former HQ, Karl-Marx-Allee, Volkspark Friedrichshain, rural 'dacha' cabins, the urban neighbourhood of Prenzlauerberg and the social housing estates of Marzahn.
16 Apr 1970
Documentary reports on the annual icing of the Oder in the 160-kilometer border area between the GDR and the People's Republic of Poland. Icebreakers from both countries with experienced skippers join forces to make the international waterway between Frankfurt and Szczecin navigable again. Everyone works hard as a team and even a broken-down ship cannot stop them from achieving their goal. A look back at the winter of 1947 with its flooding shows what the freezing of the river and the subsequent thaw can do if the ice floes are not drained into the Baltic Sea via Lake Dammsch in good time. The skippers from both countries have known each other for years and trust each other; the camaraderie that has developed on the Oder unites the people, they control the river in winter for the common benefit of all.