Bird Waking Weather

Jette and Johannes have been living together for two years when Johannes suggests that they "legalize" their relationship. Jette loves him, but the proposal of marriage terrifies her.

Next Year at Lake Balaton

Jonas and Ines are in love and want to spend their vacation together camping on the Baltic coast. But Ines’s narrow-minded parents intervene and insist that the young couple joins the family vacation. Problems arise, so everyone ends up traveling to the Bulgarian Black Sea on their own. Along the way, Jonas meets a beautiful Dutch girl who is going to India via Turkey…

Minna von Barnhelm oder Das Soldatenglück

This film takes place during the Seven Years' War. The Prussian Major von Tellheim has become engaged to the Saxon noblewoman Minna von Barnhelm. After the war, the King - in an unwarranted move - deprives the major of his honor. Von Tellheim becomes impoverished and, filled with shame, breaks off his relationship to Minna. An innkeeper in Berlin, who is a police informer, makes the Major move to a shabby little attic because he cannot pay his debt. In the meantime, Minna has also arrived at the inn. She and her lady's maid Franziska are questioned and spied on by the nosy innkeeper. Minna has followed her beloved Tellheim and she now cunningly manages to elicit a new declaration of love from him...

Sugar Sand

End of the 1970s in East Germany: Fred and Jonas are close friends. The 10-year-olds live near at the German-German frontier. After the mother from Jonas has made an exit application, the boys have to recognize that they are soon separated from each other. But they want to dig a tunnel to Australia to meet there themselves again. When Jonas should leave the country with his mother this night changes everything.

Schwester Agnes

Sister Agnes helps in all situations and does not only make friends. She has just fallen out with the new mayor. The consequences leave an entire community upside down.

3 1/2 Hours

August 13, 1961: The passengers on the interzonal train from Munich to East Berlin learn 3½ hours before crossing the border that the Wall is being built in Berlin. They have 3½ hours to make a life-changing decision: to get off the train or keep going.

Kranke Geschäfte

Armin Glaser, a lieutenant in the Stasi, lives with his wife Marie and daughter Kati in Karl-Marx-Stadt. They put their sick daughter in the care of Dr. Sigurd. But Armin becomes suspicious during the treatments. He uses his rank in the Stasi to obtain information. But the closer he gets to the truth, the more skeptical he becomes. He suspects that the GDR is allowing West German pharmaceutical companies to test drugs on East German clinic patients.

Tomorrow We Are Free

Iran 1979. The Islamic Revolution is shaking up the country. Dissident Omid, who lived for several years in the German Democratic Republic with his wife, chemical engineer Beate and their mutual daughter, hears the call from his homeland and returns to Teheran with high hopes and best intentions, bringing along his family.

Eine Pyramide für mich

A conference is to be held once again to discuss the construction of a new dam, which Professor Paul Satie rejects. During a train journey, he spontaneously leaves the train. Here in Wolfsgrün, from 1948 to 1950, he helped build the old, now far too small dam as a youth brigadier. He and the others who helped build it have erected a monument to this. A monument with his name on it. Is that perhaps why he is against the new dam?

Ach du meine Liebe

Detlev, a single insurance clerk in his 30s, is kept dependent by his loving and caring mother and loses his girlfriend Karin as a result. Grief and an alcoholic chance acquaintance prompt him to place an ad for marriage. Detlev gets caught up in a whirlwind of friendships and love affairs: with the caring widow Karin; the well-to-do hair salon owner Ute Schöbel; the cultural editor Norma Goldbach, the photo reporter Kerstin and the student Andrea Binz. Detlev, who initially proves himself as a friend and advisor, but also as a lover, becomes increasingly self-confident. He is also successful in his work and finally emancipates himself from his mother. Although he loses "his" women in a turbulent odyssey, Detlev has transformed himself from a mama's boy into a thoroughly acceptable man.

The Girl in the Lift

Frank, a tenth grade student, falls in love with his classmate Regine. His father is a well-connected plant manager in the GDR; Regine's mother is a single parent with four children. Regine wants to become a kindergarten teacher, but her grades are poor and she is not allowed to apply for technical college. Frank champions her and seeks an open discussion about these rigid regulations. But his criticism is nipped in the bud.

Murder on Monday

Photo model Monika Stange is found murdered in her apartment in a major West German city. Detectives Bentheim and Laube find rough diamonds hidden in the apartment. The trail leads to a racketeering ring and the influential industrialist Dr. Vogelsang. The latter is not prepared to get involved in the murder case under any circumstances and refuses to testify. Inspector Laube tries to solve the case without his colleague.

Immer bereit

Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin in 1950.

Pride & Attitude

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.

That's How DEFA Sounded: Film Music from Babelsberg

When people think of DEFA, the film heritage of the GDR, they probably don't just think of film images, but also some of the timeless melodies that were created in Babelsberg.

Becoming Black

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.

Die Mamais

This color documentary tells the story of the "Mamais." In 1960, a group of workers at the Bitterfeld chemical plant set themselves the task of becoming the first "socialist brigade" in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to act in accordance with the slogan "Work, learn, and live socialist."

Lost Places - Schicksalsorte der deutschen Teilung

Der Sturz - Honeckers Ende

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.

Wie die Wilden

The three friends Stepan, Kolja and Anton go camping together on the beach and are looking forward to living "like the wild ones" for a while and escaping civilization - and women. But soon Vera and Silvia turn up: two friends who claim the three men's spot for themselves because they have been camping together in this exact spot for five years. The men won't budge, so Vera and Silvia set up their tent right next door and try to scare the men away, for example by listening to the radio loudly. Stepan, Kolja and Anton agree to ignore the two women. So they change their plan: they want to make the men fall in love with them and then pretend that they are suddenly leaving...