From the crowd pleaser SISSI which launched the career of Romy Schneider to arthouse gem THE STATIONS OF THE CROSS, Film Movement presents an assortment of films from Germany and Austria, including the debut feature of Toni Erdmann-director Maren Ade (THE FOREST FOR THE TREES), complex moral parable STYX, and a darkly Austrian take on the Western, THE DARK VALLEY.
In the 1980s, foreign travelers Kenneth and Theres sing on the streets to make money while backpacking around Greece. The two are in love, but upon learning that Kenneth's mother had an accident in England, he hastily abandons Theres and returns home. Thirty years later in Berlin, Ariane, a 40-ye...
There is no Here “here.” A character simply named “Old White Male” holds court in the lobbies of various apartment buildings in Buenos Aires and expounds with measured disgust on death, consciousness, and the state of contemporary human relations. The man’s mostly unsolicited remarks form an unsp...
An archeologist and a weapons designer – who, in a prior life, knew each other as a filmmaker and a psychoanalyst – meet at an archeological excavation site in the Negev Desert and begin discussing love and war; a conversation they continue in the Israeli city of Be’er Sheva. The film then procee...
There are streets, paths, motorways, alleys, boulevards, and promenades. And there are life paths, intersections, and dead ends. Two men sit on the shady, raised platform of a brick building somewhere in Montevideo. They are submerged in a conversational marathon that never ceases. The younger of...
We live in a world where our economic system has made itself invisible and eludes understanding. In recent years, we often have had little more than a diffuse and unsatisfactory feeling that something is going wrong. But what? The episodically-structured feature-length documentary OECONOMIA expla...
Matters of identity, origin and self-fulfillment are explored in WALCHENSEE FOREVER, a cinematic voyage of discovery spanning four generations of women over a century. Uncovering hidden secrets and her role in the ancestral chain, filmmaker Janna Ji Wonders takes viewers from the family café at t...
Once a brilliant playwright, Lisa (Nina Hoss) no longer writes. She lives in Switzerland with her family, but her heart remains in Berlin, where her twin brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), is battling an aggressive type of leukemia. He is a famous theater actor, and Lisa tries moving heaven and earth...
Frau Stern (Ahuva Sommerfeld) is 90 years old and still going strong. Her health is excellent, her granddaughter dotes on her, her hairdresser supplies her with recreational drugs, and she is surrounded by friends who are less than a third of her age. Despite all this, the Holocaust survivor has ...
The year is 1826. Ludwig van Beethoven (Tobias Moretti) faces the final stanza of his storied career. Deaf and defiant, he recalls memories of his youth, when as an eight-year-old prodigy he comes under the tutelage of the Bonn court organist, Christian Gottlob Neefe. Years later after an encount...
A mysterious stranger arrives in a snow capped Austrian mountain village claiming to be a traveling photographer from America, yet is in fact an embittered gunfighter on a mission of vengeance.
DIRECTED BY ANDREAS PROCHASKA
AUSTRIA AND GERMANY / 2014 / ENGLISH
STARRING SAM RILEY
Romy Schneider makes an impressive starring debut in the delightful Austrian comedy Sissi. The titular heroine is a preteen 19th century lass of noble birth, who charms everyone she meets. Especially impressed is young Franz Joseph, emperor the Hapsburg Empire. When Sissi comes of age, the empero...
Told in fourteen fixed-angle, single shot, individual tableaus that parallel Christ’s journey to his own crucifixion, STATIONS OF THE CROSS is both an indictment of fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen’s struggle to find her own path in life. Though from the outside...
The debut feature by TONI ERDMANN director Maren Ade and Winner of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize for World Cinema. Bursting with idealism, Melanie Pröschle, a young teacher from the countryside, starts her first job at a high school in the city. Desperate to fulfill her hope...
Alliance of Women Film Journalists Selection! Read an excerpt from Marilyn Ferdinand's AWFJ review: "The careful framing, gorgeous period settings, brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces, and vibrant colors of this film are a feast for the eyes, and I admired the subtle performances of this uniforml...
Academy Award-winner Gotz Spielman (Revanche) weaves this provocative tale of three troubled couples whose lives are connected by a lattice of coincidence, love and lies. A married nurse has a wild affair with a strange doctor; a cashier tries devious means to keep her cheating boyfriend in chec...
In his final acting role, legendary auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (clad in an iconic leopard skin suit) stars as hardboiled detective Jansen. In a neon-drenched futuristic dystopia ruled by a multimedia conglomerate called The Combine, Jansen is sent on a labyrinthine investigation when their h...
A documentary about the last year of the famous director and actor, directed by Wolf Gremm.
Frankfurt, 1946. David Bermann (Moritz Bleibtreu) is determined to make the most of the ravaged postwar era by recruiting some friends from a displaced persons camp to sell linens at inflated prices to unsuspecting Germans. Most of the group have a simple motivation – to raise enough money to lea...
ER doctor Rike (German Film Awards Best Actress winner Susanne Wolff) embarks on a one-woman solo sailing trip to Ascension Island in the Atlantic. When she comes across a sinking ship filled with refugees, Rike is suddenly torn out of her contented world. Pushed to her physical, psychological an...
In the mid-19th century, hundreds of thousands Europeans emigrate to South America in a desperate bid to flee the famine, poverty and despotism that ruled at home. Jakob, the younger the son of hardened blacksmith Johann Simon, longs to escape the rural confines of his village, Schabbach. Hoping ...
In 1991, a melting glacier revealed the body of a man. At first, people assumed he was a hiker. Later, his true Stone Age origins were revealed…
The Ötztal Alps, more than 5,300 years ago. A Neolithic clan settles near a creek. Their leader, Kelab (Jürgen Vogel), is the appointed keeper of the g...
LINE 41 documents a Holocaust and Lodz Ghetto survivor's return back to today's Lodz (Poland). Until now, Natan Grossmann had repressed his desire to learn about the fate of his brother he lost contact with in 1942. 70 years later, Grossmann starts a search for his missing brother. His search cro...
Already an established filmmaker by the 1976 release of THE MARQUISE OF O, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's classic short story, the film stands as Eric Rohmer's "dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at" (The New York...
Inspired by actual events, Remembrance depicts a remarkable love story that blossomed amidst the terror of a German concentration camp in Poland in 1944. In a daring escape Tomasz, a young Polish political prisoner, rescues his Jewish fiancee Hannah. With the Nazis in pursuit, Hannah and Tomasz m...