This experimental film, set to music by Bach, illustrates quotations from the works of Karl Marx with photographs of proletarian daily life from the mid-1800s to the present.
Bello is an unemployed young man living in Berlin in the early 1930s. Although his girlfriend Frieda is underage, she goes out onto the streets in order to support both of them. A police commissioner uses this knowledge to blackmail Bello into acting as an informer for him.
The toymaker Kasimir had hardly finished carving the puppet Turli before he comes alive and starts causing unintentional mischief by skipping school and creating chaos at the puppet theater.
Like a fossil, the Marx-Engels Forum, an ambitious East German monument project, occupies a central historical spot and desirable real estate in the middle of Berlin’s new center. In this experimental documentary, Jürgen Böttcher takes a critical look at how the meaning of monuments changes.
A series of seven short claymation films from the DEFA Studio for Animated Films.
Sitting on the 7 o’clock train to Berlin on February 21, 1920, Bertolt Brecht writes the poem “Erinnerungen an die Marie A.” (“Reminiscence of Marie A.”).
While traveling as a journeyman, Paul encounters an old friend, the puppeteer's daughter Lisei. They fall in love and get married and Lisei and her father move back to Paul's home village.
Shortages in postwar Berlin have created a blooming black market, and the goods rounded up during a major police raid all seem to come from the same source. The trail leads Commissioner Naumann to the Alibaba Cabarett, but he is unable to find conclusive evidence to convict its owner Goll.
This short documentary looks at three important German visual artists: Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Otto Nagel (1894-1967).
There once was a poor miller who had no children but only three apprentices to work for him. The two older boys were lazy, mean and stupid, but youngest was hard-working, friendly, and cheerful. When the miller grows too old to work, he send the boys out into the world.