
Young Törless
1966 | 84 min | Timeless
Törless is a pupil in a secluded boarding school. He is a loner who resents the cruelty of his fellow pupils.


1966 | 84 min | Timeless
Törless is a pupil in a secluded boarding school. He is a loner who resents the cruelty of his fellow pupils.

2001 | 85 min | Documentary
Acclaimed Austrian documentary director Ruth Beckermann portrays a dying culture of Viennese urban history. The entertaining as well as insightful doc was shown at Berlinale. The Marc-Aurel-Street in Vienna. The last Jewish shop owner in the former textile disctrict, the Iranian hotelier, the cafe Salzgries with its regular customers. From summer 1999 until spring 2000, Ruth Beckermann made little trips to explore her home district with the camera. The film is also a document about the political ...

1987 | 92 min | Documentary
"A touching film full of melancholic tension." (John Bunzl, Wien Tagebuch) "I don't know exactly why I traveled east this winter," filmmaker Ruth Beckermann says of her journey through Eastern Europe. "I think I was just curious to know whether there was still any resemblance to the stories I grew up with." Beckermann's parents met in Vienna after the Holocaust; her father was a war refugee from Romania and her mother was a native of Vienna who settled in Palestine in 1938. Tracing the migratory ...

1999 | 82 min | Biography
Rigorous and engrossing, Ruth Beckermann's documentary retraces the steps of Austria's restless "sad empress" Elizabeth during trips to Egypt in both 1885 and 1891. When the camera gazes from the deck of the ship towards the endless horizon of the Mediterranean, the image of a woman who travelled the globe without pause takes shape. Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, also gradually disappears from view, as it were: from the age of 30 she refused to be photographed.

1997 | 116 min | Timeless
A documentary about the everyday lives of Zurich's forgotten youth. The school janitor calls the classroom where Xhumi and Müke are spending the last few months of their school days “the biggest damn ghetto.” Ana's hands get sweaty when asked about her future career. Oli is already standing outside—on the street. The film was shot over a year at a secondary school in Zurich. In six chapters – “Ghetto,” “Car,” “Techno,” “Sex,” “Drugs,” and “Marroni” – a multi-layered portrait of growing up in an ...

2010 | 23 min | Drama
In this Oscar nominated short, a German couple, played by Wotan Wilke Möhring and Julia Richter, adopts an Indian orphan in Kolkata. On their way to the hotel, the boy disappears. The German officials have recommended a local Indian orphanage to them. There the four-year-old boy Raju, who comes from a slum, is introduced to them and handed over. When the boy suddenly disappears and the Indian police cannot get any further with their investigations, Jan himself starts an intensive search.

2021 | 95 min | Documentary
The film follows a young woman named Beatrix, played by Eva Sommer, as she spends time alone in a house whose previous tenant was older. With no context given, the film's plot revolves around the ordinariness of Beatrix's activities, from taking care of the house to feeding a stray cat. However, it is clear that Beatrix is going through something significant in her life, which is painful and transitional, although the viewer never knows what it is. The non-professional actress Sommer brings a sense ...

2012 | 98 min | Documentary
Biene Pilavci deals with the question to what extent the hostility between her parents and the frequent outbreaks of violence influenced her and her four siblings. Although she had already distanced herself from her family at the age of 12, she comes to the realization in the course of her film that you can't go anywhere without taking your past with you. In her moving and very personal DFFB graduation film, Biene Pilavci gives us an intimate insight into the world of a complex family structure ...

1983 | 91 min | Documentary
“In my personal life I lived through different stages. There was one period determined by football, nothing but football; each Sunday we would go to see a match and I myself played in a team. Then came another period: politics. A very strong interest in politics and the attempt to understand this world that I only knew from party names so far. Contrary to today, people at the time had a very good feeling for who was a Jew. Today, with so few Jews around this is no longer so. Types like myself, with ...

1975 | 98 min | Timeless
And just like that the film disappeared in Germany and with it the scandal. In France it won the César, yet in Germany it was roundly criticized by 'Der Spiegel' and others. The Germans were 'caricatures', 'drunkenly lecherous, loudmouthed, cowardly, brutal', it was all about 'bloody effects', as even the Catholic Film Service found. Too close to the truth, perhaps? Not enough, in the German dub the text was changed, to the annoyance of Romy Schneider, who refused to speak the text. So in the dub ...

1999 | 93 min | Drama
Walter is a man in his late 50s for whom reality is somehow slipping away. In GDR times he was the director of an industrial collective, but now his life's work is a ghostly ruin. Walter is stunned by a world that has discarded him - and an inner rampage has begun. With Hilmar Thate as Walter, Cornelia Schmaus as Sylvia, Henriette Heinze as Gina, and Dirk Borchardt as Rene. "Andreas Kleinert's calm yet powerful cinematography portrays not only the lack of perspective and stagnation of the dismantled ...