Maria Braun’s wedding day was anything but ordinary: a whirlwind two-week courtship, followed by a hurried marriage ceremony at the justice of the peace amid heavy Allied bombing during the final phase of World War II. Despite their union of “half a day and a whole night”, their marriage is not a transient consequence of […]
In a Year of 13 Moons opens to a curious image of an enigmatic figure – made exaggeratedly imposing by the isolated shot of the lumbering, awkward gait of ill-fitting industrial boots – unassuredly cruising a near empty tree-lined Frankfurt plaza at daybreak before catching the attention of a male prostitute who indiscreetly follows the […]
Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven opens to an portentous shot of a mechanized, tedious activity, as Emma Kusters (Brigitte Mira) and her son Ernst (Armin Meier) assemble small electrical appliances in silence at the kitchen table: snapping the mechanism to the case, tightening the sunken screws, packing the completed assemblies into a cardboard box. It […]
A middle-aged cleaning woman named Emmi (Brigitte Mira) takes refuge from the storm and walks into a local German bar, straight into the territorial gaze of its predominantly Arabic patrons. It is one of the few places in town where foreigners are openly welcomed, where the owner populates the jukebox with Arabic music and occasionally […]
Hans Epp (Hans Hirschmuller) betrays few traces of his eroding morale as he lyrically announces his daily merchandise into the open air. He is an unassuming fruit vendor, diligently making his rounds through the residential streets, accompanied by his highly critical wife, Irmgard (Irm Hermann). After chastising him for hand delivering an order to an […]
Austere, fragmented, and minimalist, Katzelmacher captures the inert lives of a group of aimless, financially struggling apartment dwellers on an anonymous residential city street. The film opens to an implicit shot of one of the residents, Erich (Hans Hirschmüller), parked alongside a grocery store, biding idle time in his car as his lover Marie (Hanna […]