Karl Heinz Lotz, a DEFA director, tells the story of how an East Berlin family managed to follow this very route to Hungary, then Austria, and finally back to West Berlin - to arrive on that historic day when the wall came down.

He is one of the most important international film directors and his successes are

Ruth Feldmann is planning to go away for a dirty weekend with her boyfriend, the police officer Andreas Bongart. She tells her husband Karl, a sergeant in the police, that she has to visit her sick sister for a few days.

Three Smith families check in at one hotel. An American and his wife: One glass of alcohol is enough to trigger nymphomaniac seizures in her. Her hubby is restlessly preoccupied preventing her from such predicaments.

Three guests in a luxury hotel: the well-respected managing director of a computer company, an actor known to be a ladies’ man, and a murderer wearing glasses who has calculated that a hotel room provides the perfect setting for the murder of his

Verdi had fallen in love with Shakespeare’s FALLSTAFF, the wise and amusing clown, the drunkard who can laugh at himself and is well aware that everything in this world is fun - though not always good fun. He had enchanted Verdi.

He is as much a part of Vienna as Lipizzaner stallions, Sachertorte and Hans Moser are. But now André Heller intends to leave the city of his forefathers. At the age of 42 he plans a decisive break with his past life.

In the 17th century a glockenspiel was installed in St Catherine’s church in Danzig, consisting of 32 bells.

In their isolated living room Julius and Olaf experience a sort of cultivated indifference as they strive to attain absolute lack of volition.

Hippolytos, son of Theseus and Amazon queen Antiope, wants to leave Troezene to look for his father and, at the same time, flee from a dilemma: he has fallen in love with his father's prisoner, Arikia.

Professor Lichtwitz is the owner of a booming architectural office. Privately, though, he is an established philanderer and it is for this reason that he had a penthouse built which is directly accessible from his office.

Harry, a successful industrial manager in Cologne in his early 40th, meets Jessica, a young crane operator form East Berlin, while on a business trip in the GDR.

They play with Billions tells of the rise and fall of the young and ambitious Gerd Asselt in the 1980's in West Germany.

Lenglumé, a wealthy citizien, has arranged a night out with former classmates from his boarding school without his wife's knowledge. The following day, he wakes up in bed with a man.

Since his parents' divorce, 16-year-old Ralf is left to fend for himself. When the fall break comes, his mother goes in vacation with her present lover.

The pirates of the spree - that's the Kukowski kids when they board the freighter "Marianne 2" during the schoolbreaks and turn it into a playground of adventure.

She: a 50something and very successful in her profession as a fashion designer in Berlin. He: in his early 30s, good-looking without an income of his own, financially and socially dependent on her. An odd combination.

Head over heels, Hanna flees Hamburg for St. Peter-Ording on the North Sea, severing all ties with the past. She checks in at a lodge as Milly.

Andrezej Wajda's dramatization of Fjodor M. Dostojewski's novel focuses on the three main characters: The student, Raskolnikov, has slain an old moneylender. His motive has less to do with greed than with his ambition to perpetuate a perfect crime.

This film on Vienna on the eve of World War 1 purports to tell a parable alluding to the fate of present-day Europe.

The pupils of Grade 6b are upset. They have, all the while been intending to compose a pop song under the guidance of music teacher, Willi Bolbrinker, in the hope of a premiere in the coming class party.

When Milly's ‘friend’ suffers a sudden slipped disc and can't even get out of the bathtub, and her husband appears unexpectedly because the plane he was to pilot has been grounded by bad weather, the resulting situation absolutely bristles with

Lyle Taney, a Boston professor, is being blackmailed by an agent, demanding of her to spy on a free-lance scientist and his assistant. Without her knowledge the two inject her with a serum which almost kills her.

Sarah Erdmann has become engaged to Manfred Roth, who is a few years older than her, and is intent on getting married. But, the relationship seems ill-fated.

The revolutionary plays "1789" and "1793", the monumental film "Moliére", the dramatization of Klaus Mann's "Mephisto", the Shakespeare cycle - Ariane Mnouchkine's work always creates sensation, and the works

The character of King Lear represents a very special challenge for Bernhard Minetti, the grand master of German theatre.

"Congratulations to Peter Stein! He has managed to transfer his superb production of OTHELLO with the Welsh National Opera to the small screen without damaging it in any apparent fashion.

A documentary of director Peter Steín's theatrical work outside Germany shot during a performance of ORESTIE in Athens in 1986. As venue for the performance, a stone quarry was reconstructed and altered to seat 2000 people.

The film is not an expose on August Strindberg as a historical person.

The film tells the story of the rise and fall of a German businessman who is fascinated by dreams of great success. In the end the decline of this climber is not to be halted.

The three Prosorov sisters and their brother grew up in Moscow but settled in a provincial town when their father, the general, who died a year ago, was transferred there.

Summer, 1984. 50,000 people gather in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, to marvel at the vast firework show entitled "The World and the Counter-World or Tumbling through Dreams" presented by André Heller, the total-artist from Vienna.

Up to now quick-witted Vicky's life has been bound up with old things in plentiful supply as  she runs the pawnbroker shop in Berlin Kreuzberg.

Summer 1984. An audience of 50.000 people gathers at the Reichstag, Berlin, to marvel at the vast firework show entitled "The World and Counter World, or Tumbling through Dreams", presented by André Heller, the "total artist" from Vienna.

American David Shiner studied drama for three years before he discovered his talent for mime. In Paris, the international mime metropole, he was able to acquire the basic techniques.

“Faithful to the Original - the Classics and the Directors” provides an overview of vital, living theatre in the form of extracts from classical pieces staged by well-known

The hand holding the non-filter cigarette shakes, but the close-up of the television camera, examining every wrinkle and the stubble on his chin in an open search for the thief, the poet, the myth of Genet which verges on voyeurism, reveals eyes

A round-the clock-portrait of Berlin from an underground, freaked-out perspective. Documentary shots filmed as life races by, staged absurdities, sequences to catch the impetus of an extraordinary metropolis.

Elke Steube, an 18-year-old schoolgirl, reveals to her parents that she has entered a fictitious marriage with a Kurdish Turk.

The film portrays the problems of people around the age of 40, who have already lived the larger part of their life, but on the other hand aren't willing or able to go on like this.

Once again Botho Strauß rehearses a satyric drama in our society, governed as it is by the concept of the Last Judgement. He penetrates our technological present by using the myths of nature from the past.

Luc Bondy's production of THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE aims to take the Marivaux figures away from the audience, so that distance engenders clear-sightedness.

Since the death of her mother 18 years ago, Pia Gonnermann, 24, has been living alone in a feudal villa as a rich heiress.

To impose total subjugation over the Teutonic lands Varus, the Roman general, secretly tries to play Marbot, leader of the Suevi, off against Hermann, Prince of the Cheruscans. Hermann sees through the Roman intrigue and pretends to fall for it.

The two noble families, Rossitz and Warwand, are related, and since the succession of both lines has been settled by a decree stating that if one family dies out the combined property shall go to the surviving family, they keep close, suspicious and

Dieter Wellershoff’s film Fleeting Acquaintances tells a story of everyday life.

The Schaubühne Theatre rehearsed for over a year before the 9-hour epic in three parts had its premier in October 1980. Several translations and versions of the text were used as a basis for the production, to ensure that the 2.

Daughter of an American dancer and French father, Leslie Caron was already a prima ballerina in Paris when recommended by Gene Kelly as his dancing partner in Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951).

Irmgard Keun, a writer from Cologne, left her Germany in 1936, disgusted by the sight of German fascism. In 1940, still hunted by the Nazis, she returned illegally.