Many Lies

Willy Loman, a 63-year-old traveling salesman, returns home late at night, exhausted from one of his sales trips, and tells his worried wife, Linda, that he is dead tired and almost fell asleep on the road. The couple is visited by their now-adult sons, 34-year-old Biff and his younger brother Harold, known as Happy. Loman complains to his wife, especially about Biff, who, in his opinion, isn’t doing enough to succeed in his career.

In the midst of World War II, postman Ludwig Fuchs writes a letter to his former school friend Field Marshal Hermann Göring, urging him to work for peace. He is declared mentally incompetent. After the war, he struggles to shake off the stigma of alleged mental illness. Göring is executed. Fuchs forces the court to examine him: he vandalizes the lobby of Post Office 122 in Munich and is rehabilitated (with full salary compensation for lost years).

The search for a child murderer drags a once-respected detective into an all-consuming obsession.

Otto, a feckless Everyman, tries to adjust to the postwar travails of his defeated nation. Stymied by black-market profiteers and government bureaucrats, Otto begins fantasizing about a happier life at the end of that ever-elusive rainbow.

Two dubious characters disguise themselves as Holmes and Watson to gain attention and end up chasing counterfeiters and stolen stamps.

A young shoemaker is arrested for stealing a small amount of money, and is jailed for fifteen years. Upon his release, he wants to get a permit to get a job and start anew, but finds that without a job he can't get a permit, and without a permit he can't get a job. Ensnared in the absurd net of Prussian bureaucracy, he can't see any way out. That is, until he enters a thrift shop and spots a Prussian officer's uniform that fits him like a second skin...

Writer Johannes Pfeiffer who goes undercover as a student in a high school after his friends told him that he missed out on a great life experience since he was home schooled.

Homeless Alfred would like to spend his life on Mallorca. A destination far away. But one day he meets the policeman Erwin.

A group of angels look longingly upon the life of humans. Berlin now is a very different place: unified in name but overrun with crime, corruption, and—in what turns out to be a key theme here—Americans.

Father Brown is only too happy to interfere with the work of the police in solving tricky criminal cases, usually with resounding success. That's why the clergyman is transferred to a sleepy island called Abbott's Rock. At first, nothing happens there, but somehow Father Brown seems to be attracted to crime: Soon a gang of thieves is up to no good on the island. So Brown makes the headlines again, and is punitively transferred once more. This time he finds himself in a quiet Irish millionaire community.

After many years on the oceans, sailor Hannes Wedderkamp has finally returned to Hamburg. On St. Pauli, Hannes sings songs from the sea in the hippodrome of his best friend Pitter Breuer on the Reeperbahn with the "Quetschkommode" songs and cares for the audience.

A varied group of passengers boarding a ship bound for pre-WWII Germany represents a microcosm of early-1930s society.

When the First World War breaks out in 1914, Josef Schwejk, a naive dog dealer in Prague, joins the Imperial Army.

After Clown Teddy lost his son, he lost his gift for laughter. He opened a joke shop and lives above the shop. His landlady has had a foster son since birth, and Teddy decides to raise the child, who always believed that Teddy was his father. When the mother suddenly appears five years later and wants her son, Teddy decides to run away with the child and goes back onstage with his son. Will the family catch up with them, or will the mother never get her son back?

Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)