Salzburg. A few weeks before Christmas. Franz, in his late forties, secretly dreams of a career as a rock guitarist, but in real life he ekes out an unsuccessful existence as a music teacher. In addition, his marriage to Linn is in deep crisis and the pubescent daughter Julie hardly speaks to her parents.
Germany in the early 19th century. "Die Vermessung der Welt" follows the two brilliant and eccentric scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss on their life paths.
A strange family: 17-year-old Phil lives with his mother and twin sister in an old mansion on the outskirts of town. When he returns from summer camp, the mood in the mansion has soured somehow. Phil doesn’t worry about it, hanging out with his best friend Kat instead. When he starts to feel attracted to a mysterious new student at school, Phil is plunged into emotional turmoil only exacerbated by the trouble at home.
On March 25, 1996, the publicist Jan Philipp Reemtsma is kidnapped. His son Johann and his wife Ann Kathrin witness how their home is transformed overnight into a police control center. Two police officers, the family’s lawyer and a close friend form a community of fate, united by their common goal of bringing Johann’s father home as quickly and unharmed as possible.
Zenia is an industrious Ukrainian migrant worker in Poland who makes house calls as a masseur to the needy and aspirational residents of a middle-class gated community near Warsaw. He is privy to all of their problems, anxieties and secrets – and something of an unwitting guru figure. Zenia’s grounded spirituality, apparent healing powers and broad shoulders make him an object of lust for many of the lost souls in the community.
Documentary about the German opera singer Kurt Moll.
Starnberg. An idyll with fangs. This is where police master trainee Ariane from Dortmund ends up. Inspector Lu takes her firmly under his wing. Her first cases are typical and strange: the Kini is found dead in the lake - again. And then Sisi is kidnapped.
In the Bavarian provinces around 1880, waitress Zilli gets into bed with young priest Michel. Pregnant and rejected, she flees to Munich and promptly falls under the wheels. A dubious procuress wants to force Zilli into prostitution.
The Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl was in love with his sister. And she loved him back. Their relationship became sexual and caused quite a stir in the local society. But when his sister asked him to flee with her to Australia where no one knew them and they could live as husband and wife, he refused for he could not live without the beauty of the German language. Torn between his love for words and his love for Grete, Georg turned to drugs and entered a downward spiral.
From her childhood, Nadia felt responsible for her mentally disturbed and recently homeless mother, Irene. For a while Nadia had cut off all contact with Irene and tried to live her life, until Irene suddenly appears drunk at the wedding of her son, Mickey. Nadia sinks back into this quagmire of love and hate, responsibility, guilt and shame. She gathers her strength to find a home for her mother while at the same time she hides from her partner, Ian, the fact that the drunk woman at her brother's wedding was her mother. But no one can oppress Irene, let alone her daughter.
An avant-garde documentary film on English guitarist, composer and improviser Fred Frith.
Bavaria's most laid-back cop returns, juggling parenting and working at the family farm with the reopening of a grisly cold case.
In the middle of the Schaalsee runs the bureaucratically precisely defined "fluid border" between the FRG and GDR. One night a storm shifts a buoy of the border line. While the border and measuring troops from East and West meticulously try to restore order, two land surveyors throw their prejudices overboard and tear down the border between them for a short time.
Various Hollywood people talk about love.
For 350 years, the Pfandlbräu brewery in Greimeling thrived, but production has fallen from 20,000 to 8,000 hectoliters annually. Michel Pfandl, a music-loving bachelor ill-suited to business, faces bankruptcy pressure from the house bank. They demand he marry widowed brewer Sophie to merge their fortunes. When he refuses, the bank initiates insolvency proceedings, forcing Michel to confront the brewery’s future and his own values.
Barbara Hug is a young radical lawyer fighting Switzerland's antiquated prison system in the 1980s. Walter Stürm is in and often escaping out of jail becoming known as the Jailbreak King. When the two meet an unlikely alliance is formed.
Ekchart Schmidt examines the machinery behind the dream factory; the Hollywood myth is unmasked. How does the studio industry work? What role does marketing and the hype surrounding the stars play?
Although he already has searched Iraq unsuccessfully for weapons of mass destruction as a member of a UN mission, German bio-weapons expert Arndt Wolf is still obsessed with the idea that Saddam Hussein is hiding something. Nobody around him is interested in this topic any more. This changes abruptly when an Iraqi asylum seeker claims to have been involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons. The German Federal Intelligence Service summons Dr. Wolf to ascertain the legitimacy of the claims made by the informant, who has been given the code name “Curveball”.
This documentary tells the story of the creation and cultural impact of the world's most famous Christmas carol, composed in 1818 in Salzburg, Austria, and since then translated into about 140 languages.
