Content from Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen der DDR

A little everyday story about a man, his wife, her father, an old friend, and a few scenes from the unspectacular lives of ordinary people. Shot in a Berlin apartment with its authentic interior, the cinematic chamber play comically tells the story of the end of a marriage.

17-year-old Ramona comes from a home in Berlin to a small village and introduces herself as the baker's daughter. Neither of them knew anything about each other. Laconic images of the dreariness of the East German provinces show the excessive demands on the long-married baker and the mutual speechlessness of daughter and father.

Student film depicting recess at a grade school.

A railway line is to be laid through remote Lusatian farmland. Surveyors herald the “new era” with their work. The events also leave their mark on the people. Stylistically idiosyncratic first feature film by a director who comes from documentary film. The story is told as a parable about the relationship between humans and progress, with the actors making extremely clever use of their freedom.

Student film about hiding Jews during the Second World War.

A Little Boy in the ruins of World War II and the white lie of an old man - after a story by Wolfgang Borchert.

Using photos and letters that the director found in a landfill, she reconstructs in her documentary film the life of Maria Bartel, a Berlin baker born in 1902 who, as the director comments in voice-over, "was in the prime of her life during fascism." In 1920, she moved from the East Prussian province to Berlin with her first husband. After his suicide, she opened a bakery, which she ran until the end of the war in 1945, raised her son, and now has various relationships and love affairs.

Short film about foreign affairs

Red Berlin from the 1910s to the resistance against National Socialism comes to life as a proletarian family history. The siblings of Ernst Knaack, a communist who was executed in 1944, talk about their childhood and youth, which they spent with their grandparents. Their grandfather, a former sailor who took part in the November Revolution and was a member of the Workers' and Soldiers' Council, ran the Zum Kuli pub in Prenzlauer Berg—a workers' pub that was also frequented by the unemployed and homeless, where party meetings were held and leading KPD members such as August Bebel and Hermann Duncker were regulars.

In interviews, several important GDR personalities and also GDR citizens comment on the events of October 1989.

Paul Celan’s poem echoes. A drive reveals a long-abandoned Gründerzeit villa in ruin. Inside, a woman in elegant WWI attire dances, then slumps in mourning. After the war she cleans, reappears in 1930s riding clothes amid radio discontent as a maid and housekeeper move through the halls. Mourning returns with WWII’s end. Post-war, she dances to American rhythms, breastfeeds under Soviet-occupation broadcasts. Beatles and Pink Floyd play as a woman in overalls emerges, memories of the century flooding her mind. She climbs into a Trabant Kübel, helmet beside her, determined to give the villa a new life.

A portrait of a 74-year-old woman who lives in modest circumstances in a village in Brandenburg and tells her story on camera: born in 1904 in Rastenburg (East Prussia), Wolters Trude moves to Berlin at an early age with her parents and five siblings. At the age of nine, after the death of her mother, she was placed in an orphanage. In 1918, at the age of 14, she was placed with a family, working in their restaurant. She married in 1929; her husband turned out to be an alcoholic; she had eight children, six of whom survived, and whom she raised practically on her own.

A wounded Soviet soldier is kept hidden by his wife in their home for 26 months. He hopes to survive the war in this way. Too late, they both realize the error of their ways.

In 1954, the "Automat Imbiss" opened on Alexanderplatz. With its compartments from which meals could be taken in exchange for coins, it corresponded to the ideas of modernity and the future at that time. Twenty years later, when Thomas Heise shot his film, the snack bar had long since lost its showcase character. With a sober eye, he documents its everyday routines.

Short documentary

Documentary short about Husemannstraße in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg.

The five-part television film tells the exciting and unusual story of Dr. Jansen. In the early 1970s, the lawyer and government advisor is on a secret mission in South America for his clients at NATO. There, he is unexpectedly caught up in a whirlwind of adventures involving life and death. Whether in the jungle, by the sea, or in the vastness of the pampas, everywhere he goes, he encounters people who will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.