Herbert Achternbusch

This documentary takes an entertaining and informative look at the German Heimatfilm phenomenon. The first part examines the history of the genre since the 1950s, while the second part presents crowd favorites of the genre.

Open details →

Director Andi Niessner was production manager on Achternbusch's last two major feature films in 1996 and 1998. In conversation, Niessner manages to reveal the universal artist in a previously unknown intimacy and openness: Achternbusch talks about his parents, his childhood in Lower Bavaria and Munich, and his early days as a writer and filmmaker. We learn who and what influenced him, what his relationship with Bavaria is like, how his attitude toward the church has changed, and what his life is like today.

Open details →

Documentary about actor Josef Bierbichler.

Open details →

Documentary about the Maximilianstraße in Munich.

Open details →

Two men try and fail to unhinge a stone.

Open details →

Chancellor Helmut Kohl is to blame in Germany and has to go away without violence. The homeless Hick takes up the idea and demonstrates the abolition of Kohl.

Open details →

In this surrealist film director Picasso can awaken from the dead. He steals a paintings painted by himself of a couple of wealthy psychiatrists. When Picasso meets Takla Bash, a patient of the psychiatrists, Picasso falls in love. Although it is his own daughter, he remembers an incredible love affair, in which a film with a blue cow plays a role. In the majority of the paintings shown in the film are works of Herbert Achternbusch.

Open details →

This German political drama from iconoclastic filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch takes a slightly askew look at neo-Nazis and the Holocaust. His non-story (a typical trait of Achternbusch films) is divided into three parts. The first introduces Hades, an eccentric half-Jewish coffin maker. Also introduced are the women in his life. The second part depicts different scenes from the city's Jewish ghetto. Included are disturbing film clips from Nazi propaganda footage that shows the naked corpses of starved Jews piled up in the streets with the insinuation that the heartless relatives of the dead would unceremoniously toss them out when they expired. In the third part, Hades is buried at sea. In between, neo-Nazis march unopposed in Munich, Hades battles skinheads, and Hades' shop is repeatedly vandalized. A scene where Hades is fascinated with death is also seen.

Open details →

A portrait of Attwenger, the duo from Upper Austria (Markus Binder and Hans-Peter Falkner). The attempt to unite the worlds of Austrian folk music and hip-hop has already succeeded in the music of Attwenger.

Open details →

An anarchist surrealist film.

Open details →

Open details →

After Hick returns from America, he finds himself in no man's land: his station in Last Valley has been closed and Hick, the now unemployed stationmaster, leaves his family to emigrate to no man's land. In his absence, he is put on trial in Last Valley, the charges and reasons for which become increasingly vague and remain unclear until the end. In this trial, his wife defends him by emphasizing her husband's virtue - but he has started an affair in no man's land.

Open details →

After his failed first attempt in the film "Atlantic Swimmer", Hick has managed to travel to the United States. He is making his way through a variety of landscapes, driving through Wyoming, Kansas, and the Rocky Mountains, and finally arrives on the Pacific Coast, where he jots down the final notes in his book.

Open details →

Open details →

The story of the owner of the Mix Wix department store, who has successfully done business with underwear and socks and even has the largest selection of underwear. Since Mix Wix cannot improve further in this segment, it would like to expand its line to include tennis clothing. To do this, however, he needs additional commercial space, for which he must wait for the building permit. Mix Wix spends the time waiting on the rooftop of the bar, wondering if his current existence represents meaningful life.

Open details →

Comedy shot without a script on Super-8mm as a silent film, with intertitles later inserted between scenes. What unfolds is a familiar Achternbusch tale in which the protagonist (here his alter-ego, Hick) is driven by a mad longing and becomes irretrievably lost. Unable to meet the demands of the workaday world, Hick wanders alone through the city and, as in many of Achternbusch's films, enters an intermediate realm in which the dead interact with the living: he encounters and falls in love with a mummy, searches for an Egyptian queen, and stalks the inner regions of the hereafter, which lie in the middle of Munich.

Open details →

Several comedy situations are strung together for this offbeat satire. An unassuming businesswoman is discovered to be the mastermind behind a terrorist organization, and a disgruntled waitress has looks that can kill, literally and not figuratively speaking. In another tacky passage, played as a reoccurring gag, an official is infected with the AIDS virus after suffering a bite from the businesswoman.

Open details →

Dr. Riesenhuber, the State Secretary of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, can think of nothing else but advancing his career and becoming a minister, despite the world being contaminated by nuclear radiation.

Open details →

Stalingrad, 1942: just as he is complaining about the "blockheads" who are in control, a German named Herbert gets hit. Fast forward forty years after the war to Munich's Hofgarten, where in front of the patched-up ruins of the Army Museum, Herbert reappears, mistakenly believing he is still in Stalingrad, which the victorious Germans have destroyed and rebuilt in the image of Munich.

Open details →

The foehn researcher paints watercolors in which he documents the state of the world and records his visions of what is happening, while he berates the Minister of the Interior savagely. The film tells the imaginary story of the Bavarian Jammersee in fragments. The nuclear missile “Herrsching 2” - the Bavarians have finally provided for their own defense - is to be stored in a depot at the Jammersee. However, this comes into conflict with the other plan to fill the Jammersee with the ashes of the six million murdered Jews.

Open details →

Herbert Achternbusch's poetic travel diary assembles images and monologues from a trip to China.

Open details →

A writer tries unsuccessfully to sell his screenplays and plays. He marries a television editor, but she only wants to fuck him and thinks nothing of his work. He then remembers his old Parisian lover Rita, calls himself Rita from then on and becomes her wife. When a French director stages a play of his, he meets Rita again in Paris and the two women become a happy couple.

Open details →

Dentist Adi has an extraordinary dream: a boy appears to him and asks to become his father. The unknown boy has chosen the most beautiful woman in Munich - sportswoman Ilona - as his mother. She has ambitions to win an Olympic title. Adi's reality is different: He is married to Gabi. So he sets off in search of the future Olympic champion and mother of his son. He meets her in a park and a romantic rendezvous ensues. But his wife Gabi also wants him to have a child.

Open details →

Jesus returns to present-day Bavaria, walks around Munich in a somewhat dazed manner and strikes up an affair with a nun, arguing that they are married anyway. Therefore, he refers to himself as "Ober" (waiter), obviously the male form of "Oberin" (Mother Superior). He occasionally transforms into a snake when being afraid and is finally carried up into the sky by the nun, who transforms into a bird of prey.

Open details →

Voted for in Sight & Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of all time poll.

Open details →

A comic silent film about the Holocaust. A man, haunted by the historic guilt of Germany, desperately tries to find redemption.

Open details →

A filmmaker (Achternbusch) is just released from prison and has to make a living with his craft again. He is followed by a reporter who wants an interview and winds up at an inn called "Zum Neger Erwin," run by a woman whom he convinces to be the leading lady in his planned production. As the story continues, the filmmaker finds ample excuses to pan the financial powers that be and to paint the benighted and talented seekers after funds as slaves to the funding process.

Open details →

After several years in a coma, the Comanche, an Indian, wakes up in a Bavarian hospital. But reality does not match the dreams he had of it during his coma: it seems bleak and barren to him. The Comanche shows the audience his view of everyday life in Germany, with a collage of images and language demonstrating the absurdity of this reality.

Open details →

Bavaria has become an arctic, hostile environment; at the site of the former state capital, a huge geyser is now gushing through the ice sheet. Miraculously, the home village where the young monk Herbert lives has been spared from the catastrophe. Now he propagates his religion, in which a chocolate Easter bunny is worshipped and whose central commandment is "God must not be bitten". In a surrealistic style, images from Iceland and Munich are mixed with images of the Easter bunny and the Pope.

Open details →

A renowned and sensitive poet and writer is fed up with the crudenesses of his native Bavaria and, in a well-publicized move, says he refuses even to die there.

Open details →

A man who is dissatisfied with his senseless existence in his family-life and social status steals the uniform of a policeman and then enters the Oktoberfest. Now he is somebody, he is important, he can help, people respect him, etc. His wife, other relatives and some friends start to follow him while he gets some new acquaintances.

Open details →

Munich Heinz and Herbert wants to escape the torturous confines of their home by swimming across the Atlantic.

Open details →

An anxious teacher (played, as is the lead role in all his films, by the director) sits in a beer garden on the hill of the Andechs monastery. While flies drown in his mug of beer, he confronts a life of failure: the wife he ignored, the child he neglected, the teaching duties he has shirked, and his doomed efforts at winning tenure from school officials. Only a dream from the past-the memory of a former liaison with a film star with whom he shared "the Andechs feeling, a feeling that we are not alone" - provides sustenance. Despite an unexpected series of events, longing in Achternbusch's world ultimately remains stronger than fulfilment and thirst better than beer.

Open details →

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.

Open details →

An adaptation of the Henry James short story Les raisons de Georgina.

Open details →

Short film by Herbert Achternbusch

Open details →

Two men try and fail to unhinge a stone.

Open details →

In this surrealist film director Picasso can awaken from the dead. He steals a paintings painted by himself of a couple of wealthy psychiatrists. When Picasso meets Takla Bash, a patient of the psychiatrists, Picasso falls in love. Although it is his own daughter, he remembers an incredible love affair, in which a film with a blue cow plays a role. In the majority of the paintings shown in the film are works of Herbert Achternbusch.

Open details →

After Hick returns from America, he finds himself in no man's land: his station in Last Valley has been closed and Hick, the now unemployed stationmaster, leaves his family to emigrate to no man's land. In his absence, he is put on trial in Last Valley, the charges and reasons for which become increasingly vague and remain unclear until the end. In this trial, his wife defends him by emphasizing her husband's virtue - but he has started an affair in no man's land.

Open details →

After his failed first attempt in the film "Atlantic Swimmer", Hick has managed to travel to the United States. He is making his way through a variety of landscapes, driving through Wyoming, Kansas, and the Rocky Mountains, and finally arrives on the Pacific Coast, where he jots down the final notes in his book.

Open details →

The story of the owner of the Mix Wix department store, who has successfully done business with underwear and socks and even has the largest selection of underwear. Since Mix Wix cannot improve further in this segment, it would like to expand its line to include tennis clothing. To do this, however, he needs additional commercial space, for which he must wait for the building permit. Mix Wix spends the time waiting on the rooftop of the bar, wondering if his current existence represents meaningful life.

Open details →

Comedy shot without a script on Super-8mm as a silent film, with intertitles later inserted between scenes. What unfolds is a familiar Achternbusch tale in which the protagonist (here his alter-ego, Hick) is driven by a mad longing and becomes irretrievably lost. Unable to meet the demands of the workaday world, Hick wanders alone through the city and, as in many of Achternbusch's films, enters an intermediate realm in which the dead interact with the living: he encounters and falls in love with a mummy, searches for an Egyptian queen, and stalks the inner regions of the hereafter, which lie in the middle of Munich.

Open details →

Dr. Riesenhuber, the State Secretary of the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, can think of nothing else but advancing his career and becoming a minister, despite the world being contaminated by nuclear radiation.

Open details →

Stalingrad, 1942: just as he is complaining about the "blockheads" who are in control, a German named Herbert gets hit. Fast forward forty years after the war to Munich's Hofgarten, where in front of the patched-up ruins of the Army Museum, Herbert reappears, mistakenly believing he is still in Stalingrad, which the victorious Germans have destroyed and rebuilt in the image of Munich.

Open details →

The foehn researcher paints watercolors in which he documents the state of the world and records his visions of what is happening, while he berates the Minister of the Interior savagely. The film tells the imaginary story of the Bavarian Jammersee in fragments. The nuclear missile “Herrsching 2” - the Bavarians have finally provided for their own defense - is to be stored in a depot at the Jammersee. However, this comes into conflict with the other plan to fill the Jammersee with the ashes of the six million murdered Jews.

Open details →

Herbert Achternbusch's poetic travel diary assembles images and monologues from a trip to China.

Open details →

A writer tries unsuccessfully to sell his screenplays and plays. He marries a television editor, but she only wants to fuck him and thinks nothing of his work. He then remembers his old Parisian lover Rita, calls himself Rita from then on and becomes her wife. When a French director stages a play of his, he meets Rita again in Paris and the two women become a happy couple.

Open details →

Dentist Adi has an extraordinary dream: a boy appears to him and asks to become his father. The unknown boy has chosen the most beautiful woman in Munich - sportswoman Ilona - as his mother. She has ambitions to win an Olympic title. Adi's reality is different: He is married to Gabi. So he sets off in search of the future Olympic champion and mother of his son. He meets her in a park and a romantic rendezvous ensues. But his wife Gabi also wants him to have a child.

Open details →

Jesus returns to present-day Bavaria, walks around Munich in a somewhat dazed manner and strikes up an affair with a nun, arguing that they are married anyway. Therefore, he refers to himself as "Ober" (waiter), obviously the male form of "Oberin" (Mother Superior). He occasionally transforms into a snake when being afraid and is finally carried up into the sky by the nun, who transforms into a bird of prey.

Open details →

Voted for in Sight & Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of all time poll.

Open details →

After several years in a coma, the Comanche, an Indian, wakes up in a Bavarian hospital. But reality does not match the dreams he had of it during his coma: it seems bleak and barren to him. The Comanche shows the audience his view of everyday life in Germany, with a collage of images and language demonstrating the absurdity of this reality.

Open details →

Bavaria has become an arctic, hostile environment; at the site of the former state capital, a huge geyser is now gushing through the ice sheet. Miraculously, the home village where the young monk Herbert lives has been spared from the catastrophe. Now he propagates his religion, in which a chocolate Easter bunny is worshipped and whose central commandment is "God must not be bitten". In a surrealistic style, images from Iceland and Munich are mixed with images of the Easter bunny and the Pope.

Open details →

A renowned and sensitive poet and writer is fed up with the crudenesses of his native Bavaria and, in a well-publicized move, says he refuses even to die there.

Open details →

A man who is dissatisfied with his senseless existence in his family-life and social status steals the uniform of a policeman and then enters the Oktoberfest. Now he is somebody, he is important, he can help, people respect him, etc. His wife, other relatives and some friends start to follow him while he gets some new acquaintances.

Open details →

A small Bavarian village is renowned for its "Ruby Glass" glass blowing works. When the foreman of the works dies suddenly without revealing the secret of the Ruby Glass, the town slides into a deep depression, and the owner of the glassworks becomes obssessed with the lost secret.

Open details →

Munich Heinz and Herbert wants to escape the torturous confines of their home by swimming across the Atlantic.

Open details →

An anxious teacher (played, as is the lead role in all his films, by the director) sits in a beer garden on the hill of the Andechs monastery. While flies drown in his mug of beer, he confronts a life of failure: the wife he ignored, the child he neglected, the teaching duties he has shirked, and his doomed efforts at winning tenure from school officials. Only a dream from the past-the memory of a former liaison with a film star with whom he shared "the Andechs feeling, a feeling that we are not alone" - provides sustenance. Despite an unexpected series of events, longing in Achternbusch's world ultimately remains stronger than fulfilment and thirst better than beer.

Open details →

Short film by Herbert Achternbusch

Open details →

Short film by Herbert Achternbusch

Open details →