Stephanie Eidt

Two policemen are stationed on Amrum, a North Sea island on the West coast of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’ – an elder, and one who is several decades his junior. Life is easy, just that the junior can’t find a wife, because no young woman seems to be interested in the peaceful life on the island. All of a sudden, a wounded lady who turns out to be one of two bodyguard for a threatened witness who lives in hiding on Amrum, bursts into the police station and seeks help from the two officers. I missed some bits of the plot, but somehow, the second one of the bodyguards hiding the witness on the island has been killed already, and the second one, seeking help from the local police, was wounded in the incidence, and then she apparently succumbs, too.

A student named Nivedita finds an old photo of her professor and discovers the latter had been living a lie. Saraswati, of all people — a woman of color who lectures on cultural identity — is in fact white. While the media and online community whip up a frenzy, Nivedita faces a political and personal dilemma as she tries to find out Saraswati's motive.

A young couple moves to a gated community (named Sechzehneichen), where soon the creative wife (a photographer) gets bored and the husband joins a secret mens' club. All the other wives seem strangely conservative and shallow. Basically a thinly veiled take on the Stepford Wives, just without any bit of humor or atmosphere, but instead filled with the sterile, unflinching and dry seriousness that makes watching a lot of our German films such a drag and a miserable experience.

Life gets on Erol Ozak's nerves. The enforcement officer is supposed to collect something from people who have nothing. And suddenly there's a bag of money, a dead person, then the money is gone again and the melancholy man from the tax office has a bag of problems instead. A bit of genre coolness, a bit of arthouse slowness, a bit of robber's tale. Sözer and Eggert in silent greatness. Unusual, brittle, worth seeing.

Bella Figura is a play where the stage direction "flottement" (a suspension, indeterminacy, or oscillation) occurs frequently, indicating a moment of silence when the characters and audience are left in ambiguous tension. The playwright Yasmina Reza wrote Bella Figura specifically for the Schaubühne director Thomas Ostermeier, and I imagine that she included these floating silences with him in mind.

Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland.

The SOKO Köln investigates the cathedral city with humor and often with hard work. Their cases take them into a variety of environments, from the Cologne clique to the terraced housing estates on the outskirts of the city.