Peter Kern

Using unpublished and newly digitalised archive footage and film material, Bettina Böhler has brilliantly assembled this film about the life and work of the exceptional artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010.

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Rosa von Praunheim is an icon in the scene: gay activist, loving provocateur and a very special filmmaker from Berlin for decades. His curiosity for people and their fates runs through his extensive film work. For his 70th birthday he has now made 70 new short films. In the first part of the big project, he confronts Thilo Sarrazin with the mayor of Neukölln, Heinz Buschkowsky, and the Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates; shows a homosexual hustler in Bucharest; gossip reporter Andreas Kurtz, who knows everything about Berlin's celebrities; Rosa's neighbors who live with her dependent brother; Esther Bauer, who survived Auschwitz, and the Berlin comedian Ades Zabel. High on the roofs of Berlin, the gay chimney sweep Alain Rappsilber tells him about his fetish leather meeting Folsom.

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Two directors shoot a documentary about the controversial director and pugnacious actor Peter Kern. But he cannot be easily rammed into the classical form of a documentary.

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When 82-year-old Mary takes her 63-year-old disabled son on a houseboat vacation on Lake Lychen in Brandenburg, things quickly go south as the boat becomes a prison, trapping them within the difficult emotional web of their relationship.

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Documentary about the current hustler scene in Berlin. Based on interviews with former and active prostitutes, the realities of male prostitutes in Berlin are treated. The film is objective, and records the hustler scene as a social Submilieu, which is characterized by both tragic fates, as well as everyday things and routines. Not only the direct sale of sexual services is discussed, but also other aspects associated with male prostitution: poverty, drug addiction, AIDS, crime, migration, love and partnership.

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Meet Jerry, an obsessive but frustrated director who decides to turn his back on the theatre in favour of a controversial new project. But things soon start to go wrong. As he struggles with the demands of his role as leader, he is plagued by surreal dreams conjured up by his guilty conscience. Monkey Sandwich is a portmanteau film with a captivating tangle of stories involving the search for an unborn child, a disturbing hunting trip, a haunted LP, a screaming piglet and a river gone rogue. The stories in Monkey Sandwich are urban myths or stories created with or by the actors. The film was originally part of a stage performance of the same name.

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Werner Schroeter was one of the most significant proponents of New German Cinema. Schroeter was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. In her film, Elfi Mikesch, who photographed a number of Schroeter’s films and who collaborated closely with him to create his vision, provides us with an intimate insight into Schroeter’s artistic output during the remaining four years of his life.

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When director Daniel Schmid grew up, his parents ran a hotel in the Alps, and this singular setting was to influence his film. Rather by coincidence, he came to Berlin in the early 1960s and became part of the new German wave. Schmid worked with, among others, Wenders and Fassbinder, for example, as an actor in Wender’s The American Friend. He met Ingrid Caven, who was to play a diva in several of his films. This is a documentation of a part of modern European film history and a good analysis of artistry and how it corresponds to the individual behind the camera. A wealth of archival footage brings us close to many directors and actors in Schmid’s circle. If you’ve never seen a Daniel Schmid film, you are sure to want to after watching this portrait of his life.

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16-year old Axel and his clique are rioting in a residential home. There he meets the 80-year old Gustav who gains interest in the young boy, as he reminds him of his lost love.

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Two men break out of prison and go on a killing spree.

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Claire, Romy, Magali, Loete, and Jim are typical Brienen’s characters: their excessive lifestyle rhythmed by sex and drugs puts them in the margins of society, refusing to believe in love or any kind of happiness. Lacking a better alternative, they take a trip to Berlin to perform in their own erotic-trash show. But in Berlin, trouble only begins. Styled images of lost souls straying through the night and their humide debaucheries transport us into an universe of the abject where all moral limits are eliminated by the character’s insatiable bulimia.

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Policeman Simon Polt is on cloud nine. He finally has the village teacher Karin in his arms. But soon he's forced to look into the depths of humanity again: the priest's cook has been found dead. Was it the gourmet critic? The feisty woman had poured soup over his head the night before, in shock at the sight of an illustrious dinner party...

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In the eight-part program U3000 (2000), broadcasted by the music station MTV, Schlingensief assumes the role of the presenter who hates himself for his self-love disguised as telegenic selflessness. Common broadcasting formats are all being ridiculed without exception. A socially needy family can qualify for participation by winning the always same outside bet, in order to make their private fate public in front of a running camera and in the presence of passengers in the moving subway. Childlike rounds of games give them the opportunity to improve social welfare, critically watched by a jury made up of the handicapped actors from Schlingensief's ensemble. Aged show stars like Maria and Margot Hellwig, Christian Anders or Roberto Blanco are used in a talk-show wagon as cheap fodder and are forced to show compassion with such victims of the market economy. The bands of the MTV generation (Atari Teenage Riot, Surrogat, Söhne Mannheims and others) play in the dance wagon.

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Potrait of director Marilou Diaz-Abaya.

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Küstenwache is a German television series that tells the fictionalized adventures of a unit of Federal Coast Guard officers off the German coast of the Baltic Sea.

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Grandma Vera travels by bus from a small Polish town to Pinneberg to celebrate her birthday with granddaughter Linda, her husband Lothar and their two children Jan and Christina. Together with Lothar's stuffy, uptight parents, they spend a fun-filled evening. But the next morning, Grandma is dead. Although Grandma Vera actually wanted to lie next to Grandpa Pyotr in her hometown of Kovalov, the family cannot afford an expensive funeral. So there is only one option: to transport Grandma themselves.

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Esther and Sophie are BFF! When it comes to men, they however differ fundamentally . While the career woman Esther is on uncomplicated sex and therefore experienced with her lover Winnie, Sophie is still looking for her prince charming . When she meets Chip , a PC expert , she believes to have finally found this . But then it turns out that Chip is none other than Winnie . From Esther and Sophie are suddenly bitter rivals...

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The Harald Schmidt Show is a German late night talk show hosted on Sky Deutschland by comedian Harald Schmidt. The show first aired from 5 December 1995 to 23 December 2003 on Sat.1. Schmidt then moved his show to Das Erste as Harald Schmidt and Schmidt & Pocher, but he returned to Sat.1 on 13 September 2011. After cancellation on Sat.1, the show continued on Sky Deutschland in September 2012.

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Anna and Lisa, two young women, meet by chance in the vestibule of a bank, and decide after that to go on together leaving a successful trail of bank-robberies through Germany.

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The sexual fantasies of women are explored by four female directors.

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A docudrama about the eventful life of Domenica Niehoff, a high-class prostitute from Hamburg who later became a social worker: Domenica’s mother leaves Italy and her abusive husband, makes her way to Germany with her two children, but ends up in prison, and Domenica and her brother are placed in an orphanage, where they are raised by nuns. At 17, Domenica meets the older, equally violent brothel owner Joseph Rothenberg, who for ten years...

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Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...

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Axel is 14 years old, male prostitute, living in Düsseldorf. His mother drinks and her friends abuses him. He is sent to a bar to pick up customers. There he meets Karl-Heinz, and a loving relationship begins.

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An unusual story of a triangular relationship in Vienna. A woman shares an apartment with a man named Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls under his spell. It will be her last great passion. Her feelings are so strong and all-encompassing that Ivan can neither understand nor return them.

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A German woman travels to San Francisco to find her mother, but winds up distracted by the sexually flamboyant culture of the city.

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A group of cosmopolitan women passengers aboard the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Railway are taken prisoner by Ulan Iga, a warrior princess.

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Vienna's high society parties with sex, drugs, alcohol and young models. Hanna von Stezewitz stands in the center of it all. She's young, attractive and rich, head of a corporate group and one of Vienna's most important financers.

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Drama about a sick child and an old actress.

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After 20 years in prison, the former angel of death at Lainz hospital has been released, and she now works in the Prater amusement park, at a restaurant that specializes in roast knuckle of pork. Observing the guests and how they behave reawaken old emotions, and she poisons a pork knuckle to punish the happy people. The movie audience can use their remote control devices to decide who dies.

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Peter Kern developed his film from a critic's remark, "Please stop making films." When his alter ego, Peter Gläubiger, meets a critic he unloads all the built-up desire for revenge on her. And vice versa, she is also looking for revenge too - on meaningless art.

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16-year old Axel and his clique are rioting in a residential home. There he meets the 80-year old Gustav who gains interest in the young boy, as he reminds him of his lost love.

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A documentary about dog therapists in a Zurich nursing home.

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Two men break out of prison and go on a killing spree.

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The emotional death of an oversexed society. No one helps anybody else. But then, shortly before Basti attempts to commit suicide, before he jumps from Vienna's Reichsbrücke into the notoriously gluttonous Danube, something happens between the two young protagonists. Basti and Claudia meet on the bridge. Two bungee jumpers without a cord. They both recognize themselves in the other's life, between reform school and the family's butcher shop, between child abuse and games that involve getting tied up.

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Vienna in 2021. Europe is divided into American sectors. The currency is being converted from the euro to the dollar. Johnny Bush (the son of American peacekeeper George Bush) is the Chancellor of Austria. English becomes the primary language; dialects are forbidden. The Viennese meet underground (with the dinosaurs) to practice their Viennese dialect. The German journalist August Maria Kaiser comes to Vienna to research a report on the missing Jörg Haider. Haider had ruled Austria for the past 20 years and was expelled by the Americans. On his journey to uncover the truth about Haider, Kaiser meets many acquaintances.

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A provocative and ironic pamphleteering documentary about the making of Christoph Schlingensief’s Nazi-'Hamlet’ (2001). Both a media event and a form of political action Schlingensief let ex-neo-Nazis play themselves. His provocation in so-called Nazi-free Switzerland was not appreciated and when he added fuel to the flames by calling for the local political party SVP to be banned, his media offensive made front-page news far beyond Switzerland.

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The fates and wisdom of five older gays and their longings for young love between envy, despair and gay porn. The director dedicates this docu-fiction film to the Philippine director Ishmael Bernal.

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A docudrama about the eventful life of Domenica Niehoff, a high-class prostitute from Hamburg who later became a social worker: Domenica’s mother leaves Italy and her abusive husband, makes her way to Germany with her two children, but ends up in prison, and Domenica and her brother are placed in an orphanage, where they are raised by nuns. At 17, Domenica meets the older, equally violent brothel owner Joseph Rothenberg, who for ten years...

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Portrait of director Ishmael Bernal.

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Axel is 14 years old, male prostitute, living in Düsseldorf. His mother drinks and her friends abuses him. He is sent to a bar to pick up customers. There he meets Karl-Heinz, and a loving relationship begins.

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The shy Michael Seebisch wants to work even more in the new year. His great love is for computers. Only the enamel of great opera voices can transport him from everyday life to another, imaginative world.

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A decadent Cabaret in Hamburg is near closing down. The owner decides to make a last effort to save the place: produce a male striptease show. Many candidates answer to his newspaper ad. No matter how weird were the rehearsals, the owner would have no regrets.

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One of the most caustic and personal essay films ever made, Werner Schroeter's account of the 1983 Manila Film Festival, presided over by Imelda Marcos, chronicles the legacy of American and Spanish imperialism as it presents a "kaleidoscope of a ravaged country."

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A women's prison on a tropical island is a hellhole where the inmates are raped, tortured and otherwise abused by the evil commandant and brutal guards. However, one of the guards falls in love with a beautiful inmate, and decides to help her and all the other prisoners escape.

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Film extras take possession of a bogus film production company and acting as ideal world of film to persuade one associates mother-in-law of marriage.

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In the Philippine jungle, on the river of the same name, lies the small town of Pagsanjan, about 100 km from the capital Manila. Here, boatmen transport tourists daily in narrow dugout canoes upstream over rapids and past cliffs and rocks to the mighty waterfalls of the Pagsanjan Canyon, which is over 100 meters deep. However, their hard and, above all, dangerous work barely provides them with the necessities of life, let alone social security.

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