Comrade Couture

This film undertakes a journey into the amazing parallel universe of East Berlin’s fashion designers and experts in the art of survival. For, in the midst of the constraints of life in the GDR, there existed a fantasy world where it was possible to dance to another tune, be individual and even provocative. The most important characteristic of this bohemian scene was one’s per- sonal style. But this certainly wasn’t something that could be bought off the peg in the GDR. In this parallel universe it was up to you to create your own individual image – with your own hands. This film tells the story of the desires, the passion and the dreams that were tried and tested, lived and performed in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

2009-02-07 | de

Die Zeit meines Lebens - Dirty Dancing in Ost und West

In 1987, a small film distributor from Frankfurt/Main brings the film "Dirty Dancing" to West German cinemas against all negative odds. The film becomes the hit of the year, in complete contrast to France, where foreign films have a hard time against the local film landscape.

2022-07-10 | de

When Women Kill

When Women Kill is a poignant documentary exploring the shocking violence that seven women fell victim to at the hands of men. The program profiles the battered women who speak frankly about the cruel abuse, threats, and fears, and the overassertive men who led them down a one-way path to death and destruction. The film features in-prison footage, including a segment depicting a confession by a follower of the notorious Charles Manson, Leslie Van Houten, who was convicted of two killing sprees and committed to life in prison.

1983-09-06 | en

Holloway

Holloway — once the largest women's prison in Europe, now abandoned. Six ex-inmates revisit, recounting experiences, giving voice to incarcerated women. They explore vacant cells and corridors, recalling memories from their time inside.

2025-06-18 | en

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street

The film follows a simple structure, and shows the drug-related degradation of five youths (Jake, Tracey, Jessica, Alice, Oreo) during the course of three years. The film depicts drug-related crimes and diseases: prostitution, male prostitution, AIDS, and lethal overdoses.

2000-03-17 | en

Karl Marx und seine Erben

Over the past hundred years, dramatic social upheavals have taken place in the name of Karl Marx's theories. In Western Europe, the student movement of 1968 and the Eurocommunists were inspired. And in recent times, the thinker has experienced a renaissance.

2018-04-28 | de

Erich Mielke - Master of Fear

Docudrama about life, career and breakdown of Erich Mielke, the former Security chief of East Germany.

2015-11-05 | de

Stasi, un État contre son peuple

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.

2021-10-03 | fr

Uferfrauen - Lesbian Life and Love in the GDR

Portraits six lesbian protagonists from rural and metropolitan parts of the formerly socialist Republic and has them tell their captivating and sometimes outrageous life stories.

2020-09-03 | de

whisper & SHOUT

Documents important parts of the East German rock music scene of the late 1980s, from well-established bands like Silly, to underground rock bands like Feeling B. This road movie features young people using music to express their take on life, opposition to their parents' generation and opinions on the social and political climate in East Germany. It includes clips from concerts and interviews with fans and members of various bands, such as Feeling B's Christian Lorenz and Paul Landers, now members of Rammstein.

1988-10-20 | de

Kemper on Kemper: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer

Ed Kemper, also known as the Co-Ed Killer, murdered and dismembered 10 people, including his own mother. Former FBI agent John Douglas takes us through his extensive interviews with Kemper, which became the backbone of modern criminal psychology.

2018-10-10 | en

Out in East Berlin: Lesbians and Gays in the GDR

Paragraph 175, which made homosexual behavior punishable by law, was abolished in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1968. At that time, heterosexual nuclear families constituted the center of socialist society, and homosexuality was considered a peripheral issue in the GDR. Out in East Berlin —Lesbians & Gays in the GDR tells the impressive-to-absurd personal histories of gay men and lesbians in the GDR, from the post WWII years until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

2013-10-31 | de

La Brigada – A Mural for the Unidad Popular in Dresden

During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.

1976-01-01 | de

Fyre Fraud

A true-crime comedy exploring a failed music festival turned internet meme at the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism, and morality in the post-truth era.

2019-01-14 | en

The Family

Anne Hamilton-Byrne was beautiful, charismatic and delusional. She was also incredibly dangerous. Convinced she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Hamilton-Byrne headed an apocalyptic sect called The Family, which was prominent in Melbourne from the 1960s through to the 1990s. With her husband Bill, she acquired numerous children – some through adoption scams, some born to cult members – and raised them as her own. Isolated from the outside world, the children were dressed in matching outfits, had identical dyed blonde hair, and were allegedly beaten, starved and injected with LSD. Taught that Hamilton-Byrne was both their mother and the messiah, the children were eventually rescued during a police raid in 1987, but their trauma had only just begun.

2016-07-30 | en

Born in Evin

Follows filmmaker and actress, Maryam Zaree, on her quest to find out the violent circumstances surrounding her birth inside one of the most notorious political prisons in the world.

2019-10-17 | de

Wasted Talent

2018-07-01 | en

Trotz und Treue: Das Phänomen Sahra Wagenknecht

2024 is likely to be a decisive year for Sahra Wagenknecht's political future. In the arena of power, she might assume a role that she is already very familiar with. In the early years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sahra Wagenknecht became the "most famous face" of the PDS, the successor party to the SED. Yet, even as the youngest member of the party's executive board, she was considered a "disruptive factor." She is unyielding and swims against the tide. Sahra Wagenknecht does not distance herself from Stalinism, nor from the Berlin Wall, and wishes for a reformed GDR.

2024-06-13 | de

Something to Do with the Wall

In 1986, Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the world’s most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore. But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.

1991-04-03 | en

Das letzte Finale der DDR – Zwischen Mauerfall und Wiedervereinigung

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.

2020-06-02 | de