Content from ZDF/3sat

In this film, shot in Drachhausen/Hochoza in southern Brandenburg, film students from Potsdam reinterpret Schiller's play ‘Die Jungfrau von Orleans’ (The Maid of Orleans) and set it in Lower Lusatia. Johanna, the harvest queen, campaigns for the expansion of a solar park. She is celebrated by many for this, but some are hostile towards her. After the cock plucking/łapanje kokota, a scandal erupts in the ballroom.

The ensemble of buildings that makes up the maternity clinic and art school in Hamburg where the director taught is the starting point for this sober interrogation of how motherhood and career can be combined based on three generations of German women.

Was grandpa a Nazi? When director Jens Schanze confronts his mother with her father's past, decades of silence have passed. The information that emerges about grandpa does not fit with the loving father that Jens' mother always talked about. Jens and his four older sisters never met their grandfather; he died in 1954. Jens' mother is in her seventies when her son, born in 1971, starts to poke around in the family history. She agrees to a critical examination of her father. Secrets hidden for over 60 years finally come to light. As they uncover the truth, this perfectly normal family goes through a highly emotional journey. Most shaken is the mother; her story of discovery is at the center of the film.

Coal mining has shaped Lusatia for generations. In the GDR it was still an important industrial location but, after the fall of communism, companies shut down and livelihoods were destroyed. With the planned phase out of coal, the region is facing another upheaval. Britt Beyer takes a sensitive look at the people who must deal once again with the collapse of existing structures and points of reference.

How do people live in snowbound areas? What are the mechanisms for simply moving snow around? How have ski resorts mechanised what ought to be a natural process? Above all, MELT shows us the catastrophic impact of climate change. Glaciers are melting; seasonal snowfall rates are askew; and at the South Pole, an entire continent is breaking apart. What will happen if all these places succumb to rising temperatures? As one scientist states, “that water has to go somewhere.” A film of imposing beauty, MELT is also a comprehensive study of global warming as it is directly experienced by arctic and alpine communities. Geyrhalter offers a stark warning about an ominous future, one we may still be able to avoid.

In this autobiographical documentary, Rosa explores her anxiety, derealisation, and a mother-daughter bond shaped by shared trauma.

Don Giovanni, opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Italian libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte) that premiered at the original National Theatre in Prague on October 29, 1787. The opera’s subject is Don Juan, the notorious libertine of fiction, and his eventual descent into hell. For Mozart, it was an unusually intense work, and it was not entirely understood in his own time. Within a generation, however, it was recognized as one of the greatest of all operas. Presented by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre with narration provided by Sir Peter Ustinov.

Director Thomas Heise picks up the biographical pieces left by his family, and composes an epic picture of four generations of his family, of a country, of a century.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio" is a famous spectacle that is enigmatic and exotic at the same time - and just because of this it is not only perfect for the fantastic stage sets of the marionette theatre, but for Ustinov's winking presentation as well. Already in 1782 the Vienna audience was enchanted by the lyrical drama by which the new inhabitant Mozart presented himself as master of opera to the audience of the imperial city. On the one hand, "The Abduction of the Seraglio" is a subtle comedy, on the other hand it conveys important humanitarian values: the Europeans captured in an Ottoman palace are not saved by a military attack but by the generosity of the sovereign "Selim Bassa" - actually mortal enemy of the Habsburg monarchy which was at war with Turkey in Mozart's time!

The capitulation of German socialism on November 9, 1989, happened almost incidentally — through a travel law. Thirty-five years after the disappearance of the GDR, this essayistic documentary reflects on transformation through personal memory and public imagery.

Così fan tutte, comic opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that premiered in Vienna on January 26, 1790. It is the last of his three operas with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, the first two being The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787). Presented by the Salzburg Marionette Theatre with narration by Sir Peter Ustinov.

With the opera "Le nozze di Figaro" commenced the remarkably successful cooperation between Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The first night of "Figaro", presumably Mozart's most perfect musical comedy, was held in Vienna on May 1st, 1786. It is based on Beumarchais' "scandalous" comedy "La Folle Journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro" which, after its first staging in the pre-revolutionary Paris of 1784, soon became a huge success throughout Europe. For the opera, the revolutionary content of the intricate comedy of love and conspiracy against the background of noble capriciousness was actually toned down but not completely abandoned. The extensive ensemble scenes, the treatment of the orchestra and the delicately nuanced musical profiles of the characters hit the target and, looking back, proved to be pioneering for following generations of musicians.

Portrait of the Swiss artist H.R. Giger.

Does history with all its nightmares have to keep repeating itself? What bolsters the thin layer that shields us from the abyss?

The documentary film by and with Stefan Hayn describes how election posters, cigarette, detergent and cinema advertisements refer more or less clearly to topics such as tax legislation, security in old age, increasing fears about losing one's job, and domestic and foreign policy crises. In order to develop this impression, in 1998 Hayn began painting watercolors of billboards that had been put up in Berlin. From the outset, each sheet was intended as a "setting" of a documentary film that would document the economic, political and interpersonal changes that would become visible in "public" images up until 2005.

A multi-layered, moving portrait of the filmmaker and winner of multiple Grimme Awards Gisela Tuchtenhagen, one of the first German camerawomen of the 1970s, who has left a sustained mark on the documentary film genre ever since.