Between Two Wars

Interdisciplinary studies put into practice is a plane on which HaF's interests and mine coincide. Ideas of fictional research projects in films emerge very early on, or of film as research device, allowing people from different disciplines to come together and discover something, to pursue a line of thought, or just be adventurous. These ideas correspond to a tendency we both have of accumulating knowledge from different sciences, for example so as to bring exact sciences like medicine together with subjects which aren't directly aimed at application, such as religious studies or anthropology.

A film about an amour fou between a young doctor and a former teacher. She, daughter of German Jews who emigrated to France, returns to Germany one day: she escapes from her bourgeois life in France into the memory of her childhood.

Like the wife of King Arthur in the legend, the main character in Ginevra, actress Cecilia Linné, is a figure of inspiration torn between two worlds and two men. She gives up her “contract” with society and its entanglement of love, work and money.

Three young Georgians have to clean a castle in Berlin, where a German arms manufacturer's art collection is being set up for an exhibition. Of course, the proletariat isn't welcome at the opening party and they are banished to a servants' room in the attic. Downstairs, however, a splendid buffet attracts them - so why not just ignore the unfair prohibition and cross the line of class society? Didn't the French Revolution start over a piece of cake?

Nina and Ben go on a vacation without their daughter to the Mediterranean. Their vacation is going well until Ben goes swimming with a young woman during a wild beach party and she does not come back.

Anishoara is a 15-year old girl living with her grandfather and little brother in a small village among the rolling green hills of Moldova. Her life is marked by the quotidian rhythms of country life; in summer she feels the overwhelming sensation of first love when on a trip with friends to the melon harvest. In autumn a strange German tourist disrupts her otherwise calm existence.  In winter she travels for the first time to the sea alongside the young man with whom she fell in love. In spring she longs for her lover's return, but when that moment comes it's not what she expected.

Documentary that blends dramatized reconstructions, personal reminisces and newsreel footage to tell the story of the flight of German refugees through occupied France to Marseilles in 1940. In 1977 Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embark on a journey through France. They trace the escape route of the German emigration in France 1940/41, documenting the places, talking to witnesses, relating the temporal layers.

An 3-hour project conceived by ten directors presenting the famous German legend of Kaspar Hauser, the story of a man who spent his childhood and adolescence raised on a cave by a strange man who kept him there for 18 years. One day, the man decides to take the young man out of the cave and takes him to a city where the under-developed subject will finally learn what it means to be a human being.

An unconventional essay film that interrogates the visual and ideological legacy of the Vietnam War. Blending staged scenes, archival footage, photographs, and philosophical dialogue, the film follows various characters — including an American soldier captured by North Vietnamese villagers — as they reflect on violence, memory, and image-making. Set partly in West Berlin and partly in reconstructed spaces representing Vietnam, the film avoids traditional dramatic narrative in favor of a fragmented montage of voices, documents, and reenactments. Interweaving love stories, political debate, and historical commentary, Farocki creates a critical reflection on how war is represented, seen, and imagined, both in cinema and in public consciousness. The result is a complex meditation on images as weapons and instruments of perception.

Berlin, a summer in the age of neoliberalism: the spectre of the soviet avant-garde is haunting the city. A young Georgian contract-worker is surprised to find the ghost of the Russian revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in his kitchen. At the same time, his friend Kasimir inherits a big fortune, but what shall he do with all this money? Framed by a travel through time leading to Flaubert's 19th Century und the shooting of a revisionist melodrama for German television, the film follows the adventures of these three characters in contemporary Berlin. A suprematist digital comedy about the transmission of emancipatory energies.

Sophie is admitted to hospital with a fainting spell. She has recently started feeling sick all the time and has a headache. She fears she might be pregnant again. And now she is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her husband Joachim is never around and their three sons consume all her energy. She throws herself into an affair with the doctor Paul Wolff in order to feel alive again.

Vienna at the turn of the century: The industrialist Friedrich Hofreiter is a vain, self-important man who is used to taking what he wants and who enjoys exercising power. His tender wife Genia increasingly recognizes his deceitfulness. The Russian pianist Alexei Korsakov, a subtle artist, commits suicide because of her. Hofreiter, on the other hand, travels to the Dolomites with his friend and family doctor Dr. Mauer, who is in love with the young Erna. Hofreiter makes her his lover in front of Mauer's eyes. In turn, he provokes Genia's lover into a duel and shoots him. In the end, there is only emptiness. Faithful adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's stage play.

An aging King invites disaster when he abdicates to his corrupt, toadying daughters and rejects his one loving, but honest one.

A director, his fiancee, a scriptwriter and a student interact and discuss their emotions, at length.