Eberhard Fechner

Chronist des einzigartig Normalen

Documentary about director and actor Eberhard Fechner

Ödipussi

Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.

Abschiedsvorstellung

A classical who-dunnit-detective-story in an unusual setting: In the retirement-home for aging stage-artists "Ewige Rampe", an overly engaged doctor discovers what seems to be a murder by poison. The victim is the only inhabitant of the home who was not on stage, but a reporter of a gossip magazine. The two investigating police inspectors soon find out that the deceased lady blackmailed most of the inhabitants with little secrets she found out in her time as a reporter - nasty, but harmless things like a little shoplifting, alcoholism, a corrected date of birth, a success one never had... but are these little old secrets reason enough to kill someone? Or is there someone with a more important dark spot in the past? And

Grabbe's Last Summer

Iranian director Sohrab Shahid Saless has succeeded in taking on an unusual project — the life and times of a German literary figure — and making it interesting. Christian Dietrich Grabbes lived a very short life in the first half of the 19th century and is primarily known for his satire, skepticism, basurd theater and the fact that he presaged the Postmodern movement in literature. Hannibal and Don Juan and Faust are two of his better-known works. In this docudrama, his Comedy, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning is featured partly because it gives a drubbing to the icons of German thought that had a stranglehold on the creative process. One memorable moment in this three-and-a-half-hour story is when the alcoholic writer is caught in the throes of delirium and comes around to see his own mother as a figure of death. The irony is that an Iranian director could capture the spirit and age of a German writer so well

Nachrede auf Klara Heydebreck

Documentary research on the traces of a female pensioner, who committed suicide in Berlin in winter 1968.

The Harvest of My Lai

Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls investigates the massacre of My Lai by U.S. soldiers.

Preis der Freiheit

24 hours on the border between East and West Germany. In an outlying West Berlin district, police officers chat about their personal lives, take care of petty offence and at most, warn the odd rubbernecker away from the border to the “Soviet zone”. Meanwhile their East German counterparts are under enormous pressure. The day begins with disciplinary action after one of the border guards was found sleeping on duty. The supervisors demand utmost vigilance and a solid ideological bent, and suspicion and mistrust are the rule within the ranks of these soldiers of the National People’s Army (NVA). Unnoticed by the soldiers, four East Berlin students are preparing to flee to the west. But in the morning mists, only their accomplice, an NVA private, succeeds …

Ein Tag - Bericht aus einem deutschen Konzentrationslager 1939

Germany, January 1939: a day in a concentration camp. Subjected to harsh military discipline the hungry prisoners are digging a huge hole and filling it up again. Several are tortured, die of exhaustion, in the electric fence, or are shot.