Anja Schmidt-Zäringer

Männer im Trenchcoat, Frauen im Pelz

Film noir, which enjoyed particular success in the 1930s and 1940s, is probably the most profound genre of classic Hollywood cinema. Eckhart Schmidt tries to show the background and developments and speaks, among others, with directors such as Richard Fleischer and Robert Wise as well as with "femme fatale" actresses. Filmmakers of the following generations explain how the style and themes of noir continue to shape cinema today.

Picasso in Munich

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.

Broken Hearts

The daughter of a gangster tries to seduce her driver.

Epstein in Hollywood - Julius J. Epstein Talks

Documentary by Eckhart Schmidt.

Undine

Once before, the ravishing lake mermaid Undine has warned her lover Raoul. Their humid-romantic fairy-tale love is in danger because Raoul's brother wants to destroy the pristine mountain lake idyll with an ambitious hotel project. Undine defends her paradise. She is alluring, but also perverse and unpredictable. She can give a lot of love, but she can also kill.

Hatschipuh

In the Bavarian village of Schladerbach, the kobold Hatschipuh and his comrades live, of whose existence only Grandpa Reiter is aware. When the building constructor Lederer builds himself a new mansion, the subterranean settlement of the kobolds gets destroyed, and Grandpa Reiter sees himself forced to move them into his barn. But this abode as well is soon threatened: Since the farm is no longer profitable, Father Reiter plans to sell it…

Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles

This 1987 documentary is the only window into an experimental open-air penal colony in the Peruvian Amazon, which no camera has ever entered and has been rarely written about.