Stefan Aust

When German police viciously quell a protest against the shah of Iran, popular journalist Ulrike Meinhof rebels against her dishonest marriage, walks away from her children and joins radical anarchist Andreas Baader. Together with Baader's girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, they form the violent Red Faction Army, and together perpetrate a slew of terrorist attacks as a way of disrupting the fabric of what they see as an increasingly fascist state.

The Stammheim trial against the leadership of the first generation of the RAF was one of the most elaborate in the Federal Republic of Germany. Through this trial, Stammheim also became a place of identity for the RAF. The docudrama uses the perspective of Horst Bubeck, who as a prison officer in the cell wing had the most intensive contact with the prisoners, to shed new light on the history.

The third episodic film, after Deutschland im Herbst and Der Kandidat, in which notable German filmmakers reflect on the state of their country. A collage of documentary and dramatised sequences dealing with such topics as overkill, peace demonstrations, NATO arms policy, and life after the next war.

Based on the research for his non-fiction book "Der Baader-Meinhoff-Komplex", "Spiegel" journalist Stefan Aust wrote the screen play to Reinhard Hauff’s controversial feature film that re-narrates the startling trial against the RAF terrorists Baader, Meinhoff, Ensslin, and Raspe. The trial that started in May 1975 in the Stammheim maximum-security prison extended over 192 days and ended with a lifetime sentence for all defendants.

The SS chief Heinrich Himmler wanted to exchange Jews against so-called German Reich abroad, against arms sales or for cash - with the express approval of Hitler.

Hamburg, end of the 1960s: occasional pothead Jan, also known as "the pirate", makes a career for himself in the local drug scene. He quickly becomes the "hash prince of Hamburg". But when he starts dealing heroin, he also draws his brother Ludwig into his dark business...

The Baader-Meinhof gang, a left-wing terrorist collective born of the student revolutions of the Sixties, terrorized West Germany with a series of bombings, assassinations and hijackings in the Seventies. They became die RAF - die rote army fraktion in 1970. It is claimed that property destruction during the Watts riots in the United States in 1965 influenced the practical and ideological approach of the RAF founders. As for changing the world, they failed. All they achieved was to make West Germany a less tolerant, more paranoid society than it had been before.

Made with an eye to the autumn of 1980 when the German parliamentary elections took place, The Candidate examines Germany’s history past and present and Franz Josef Strauß, the man who, as the CDU/CSU candidate, aspires to be elected to the most important political office in the land.