Christian Petzold

Self-important author Leon joins his best friend on a summer holiday near the Baltic Sea to complete his novel. When they arrive, they find their house is already occupied by a carefree woman who challenges Leon to open up. Meanwhile, forest wildfires rage around them and impending disaster looms.

In the aftermath of WWII, German-Jewish cabaret singer Nelly has to undergo facial reconstructive surgery following her survival from Auschwitz. Without recognising Nelly, her former husband Johnny asks her to help him claim his wife’s inheritance. To see if he's betrayed her, she agrees, becoming her own doppelgänger.

Undine is a historian and tour guide at the Berlin City Museum specializing in urban development, while Christoph is an industrial diver. Linked by a love of the water, the two form an intense bond, which can only do so much to help Undine overcome the considerable baggage of her former affair.

In an attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France, Georg assumes the identity of a dead author but soon finds himself stuck in Marseilles, where he falls in love with Maria, a young woman searching for her missing husband.

After a car crash kills her boyfriend, piano student Laura is taken in by Betty, who witnessed the accident. Living with Betty's family brings comfort, but Laura starts questioning their intentions as time passes.

In 1980s East Germany, Berlin doctor Barbara is banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good-natured clinic head, Andre.

Nina, a mentally ill teenage orphan, starts a new job as a garden cleaner when she meets Toni. They fall in love but soon Toni starts betraying Nina. Meanwhile, Francoise is picked up at a Berlin psychiatric hospital by her husband, Pierre. After spotting Nina, Francoise believes that she has found her kidnapped daughter Marie, but no one believes her.

Clara and Hans are left-wing terrorists who have been sought by police for almost fifteen years. Their increasingly rebellious daughter Jeanne begins to pose a threat to their security when she falls in love with a boy she meets on the beach.

Barrage and Bunker is an essay film about the (narrative) space imagined by fiction films. Reflections and associations about movement in space are the basis of every kind of story-telling. The film is sometimes referred to as part of Bitomsky's Cinema Trilogy. Sequences from over 20 movies are quoted and commented on by a team of three "researchers" (Bitomsky, Petzold, Tanner) in a sort of laboratory. TV-monitors, production stills and screenshots are used as well as quotations from books. A long night's work.

A lonesome car. The wind is whistling. A door of an undefined building opens—is it a holiday bungalow, a shed or a ruin? A woman is standing at the window. The heat of an idle day of holiday, perhaps. The South, a place of longing.

A young East German woman leaves her controlling husband/business partner and relocates to a West German city to start anew as an accountant, but he soon catches up with her.

Die UFA, a film essay about the eponymous German studio.

In a small Northern German town, a dishonourably discharged Afghanistan veteran is offered a job as a deliveryman by an alcoholic Turkish entrepreneur, through which the former meets the latter's gorgeous wife.

Short film made by a group of young directors in Berlin.

Johannes is a loner who wants a better job. And then he meets Ana. Ana is attractive and even though her job is even less prestigious than Johannes's, he falls for her. And then she quits her job to be with him (and be dependent on him) and suddenly things become much more serious. She has fallen for him. But does he still love her? Did he ever? Enter Sarah. Sarah is the daughter of Johannes's boss. He and she have a past. Will Sarah and what she represents be his future, and Ana just a memory, something he'd like to erase?

How should one define the relationship of documentary film to reality? Does it aim at authenticity or is it rather an “exile of reality”, a “foreign homeland of reality”, where the pre-filmic, stripped of its immediacy, comes to its own right in the first place? Where in its mis-en-scène would be the line drawn to a fictional film, if drawing a line would succeed at all? These are the kind of questions this film essay on the history and aesthetics of documentary film deals with in its seven chapters.

Philipp Gerber is a smart, but self-satisfied car salesman. In an inattentive moment at the wheel of his car, he runs over a boy on a bike and, instead of helping him, he drives away. As he has feelings of guilt, he tries to find out more about the accident’s victim.

Middle-aged lawyer Thomas meets Leyla at the pool. After their paths keep crossing, he asks her out on a date. Somewhat to his surprise she agrees. The next morning Thomas awakes to find Leyla and his laptop, which contains vital case files, missing.

Vera and Heike are two friends who aspire for a dazzling lifestyle, but don’t own any savings to do so. Vera decides to start stealing from men while sipping drinks with them in bars. When Heike takes over her job, her technique doesn’t prove as successful and she ends up being caught at once.

Petra professionally works as a thief abroad to finance the studies of her younger sister Franziska in Germany.

Shortly after German reunification, three residents of a quiet area north of Berlin talk about their plans and attempts at new economic beginnings amid the changes brought by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The social democrats of the sixties and seventies worked on their grand plan to build a highway network in Germany that every German citizen could reach within five minutes of their home. The little film hangs around between and on the streets of this network - where the country discos, pedestrian zones, shopping centers, hospitals and roads home are behind noise barriers.

Tom steals Tina's love and money, and five years later they meet again by chance. Both wanting to get back what was taken from them, they dream of traveling to Cuba. In the end, however, they only manage to get as far as the Belgian coast.

Drifters tells of Karin, a past-her-prime cosmetics saleswoman, with her increasing exasperation with her life and her dreams of leaving it all behind and living in Paris. An unlikely but entertaining plot develops, where anything can happen.

Polizeiruf 110 is a long-running German language detective television series. The first episode was broadcast 27 June 1971 in the German Democratic Republic, and after the dissolution of Fernsehen der DDR the series was picked up by ARD. It was originally created as a counterpart to the West German series Tatort, and quickly became a public favorite.