Jo Baier

A wide-ranging, energetic period piece tracing the rise of the Protestant Henry of Navarre as he goes from battlefield warrior to France's beloved King Henri IV. Director Jo Baier's epic is a classically entertaining adventure, albeit one with more than a little bloodshed and frequent bawdy sexual interludes. In late 16th-century France, Catholics and Protestant Huguenots were at war. Seemingly seeking peace, the French dowager queen, Catherine de Medici summons Henry to her court to have him marry her daughter, uniting the two warring factions. However, the Catholics slaughter the Protestant wedding guests in what became known as the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and Henry-now married-must use all his guile to both stay alive and maneuver for the throne. [Written by Palm Springs International Film Festival]

In 1944, a group of high command officers plot an attempt against Hitler, and one of the leaders of the conspiracy, Stauffenberg, goes to a meeting with the Fuhrer in charge of exploding the place. However, Hitler survives and the officers are executed. This unsuccessful operation was called "Valkyrie Operation", and this realistic movie discloses this true event.

August Staudenmeyer returns after thirty years absence as a wealthy man in his hometown Gerbersau. First, the successful businessman is received with open arms. But when he stands up for the outlawed widow Katharina Entriss, he gets sidelined. August realizes that the narrow-mindedness of the Gerbersauer has by no means changed. Richer for an experience and a love, he leaves home a second time.

Based on the childhood memories of actor Michael Degen, the movie deals with the everyday struggle to survive as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany. As his father had died in 1940 after being released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Michael and his mother fear to be deported themselves. They manage to live in Berlin with false names and faked papers, hidden by several, often broken, people...

An old smuggler and fence wants to use his very young and beautiful wife to find out about the plans of the new, ambitious border policeman. With somnambulistic certainty, she pulls out all the stops of female seduction. The man's clever move seems to be successful. But the young woman's game becomes serious. She falls in love with the vital man who makes her aware of her sexual frustration and the failed joy of motherhood. When her husband sees through the true circumstances and the young woman has to realize that her lover has also abused her as an informant, the catastrophe can no longer be stopped.

When an extraordinary man who has lived through all is approaching his end, he decides to call his son to join him for the last time at his home in Tuscany. His intention is to share some valuable conversations about his life as a press correspondent in Southeast Asia, about the political and social changes which he has seen, and about the spiritual transformation he has experienced in recent years. But for him the most important is to show his son how he is preparing for the last great adventure of a lifetime.

In the 1980s, the Italian Salvatore ends up in a small village in the Alps. Salvatore tells the villagers that he is going on vacation for two weeks. During this time, he befriends the widow Frieda, who is still mourning her husband, who never returned from the war. Salvatore also comforts 40-year-old Romy, as her husband is addicted to alcohol and is in a wheelchair. He even enters into a relationship with Erna. The nurse is forced to live with her father Stockinger, who takes good care of her son but has become embittered himself. What Erna doesn't realize is that Salvatore has a dark secret: he knows that the murderer of his entire family has settled in the small village and is seeking revenge...