Passing Summer

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

A young Berlin photographer participates in an apartment swap with a stranger in Marseille to briefly explore the French city.

Mimmi is a very lonely girl, not knowing what to do with her life. On the search for friends and boyfriends, she wanders around alone in different cities.

At the Paris airport Orly, a woman falls for a stranger, a family heads to a funeral, a couple lose touch, a wife reads her husband’s break-up letter. All wait for their planes. Absorbed in their immediate fates, they move through the impeccably structured space, unaware of a looming threat outside.

Thirteen European directors explore the theme of Sarajevo; what this city has represented in European history over the past hundred years, and what Sarajevo stands for today in Europe. These eminent filmmakers of different generations and origins offer exceptional singular styles and visions.

A family spends three summer days in a beautiful lake mansion close to Berlin. Together with her new lover, Irene visits her brother Alex, who still inhabits the house with Irene's writer son Konstantin. Konstantin's girl-friend pops in, too, and all of them drift away from each other more and more.

This somewhat superficial historical drama is about the 1525 Peasants' War in Germany when the lower classes rebelled against oppressive conditions imposed by the clergy and nobility and then committed many acts (including atrocities) that did not morally set them far apart from the people they were fighting. It was a time of upheaval: Martin Luther (1483-1556) had broken away from the Catholic Church, calling for reform, and Anabaptists in Germany, like Thomas Munzer fought on the side of the peasants (opposed by Luther). This complex age and its political and religious turmoil are summed up in a story about an attack on a small monastery whose monks used a forged document to confiscate some land from the peasants. When their wrong-doing is revealed by the monk who forged the document in the first place, the peasants attack.

A woman converses with another over the phone, witnesses a theft, and samples a record in a store.

Prompted by a seminar given by acclaimed German filmmaker Peter Nestler, Prague, March '92 combines 16mm footage shot over the course of a week in the title city with excerpts from Bohumil Hrabal's essay "The Magic Flute," which considers the 20th anniversary demonstrations in Prague to commemorate the death of Jan Palach, who immolated himself in January 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion.

Nadine is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing, until she hears someone else singing and everything falls back into place again. A melancholic observation of two young couples having difficulties trusting one another. They are full of skepticism and searching for a purpose in life.

Theres and Kenneth are both young when they first meet whilst on holiday. They fall in love but are unable to prevent themselves from losing each other. Thirty years later, in another country, another couple: Ariane leaves her husband David because she no longer loves him. The paths they both take lead them to Kenneth and Theres.

Thirteen German directors present short films exploring the state of their country.

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

A young photographer has fallen in love with his girlfriend's sister, throwing the trio into chaos.

Abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, Jon is taken in and adopted, without having known his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, a warden in the prison where he is incarcerated after a deadly tragic accident. She seems to seek out his presence, takes care of him, records music for him. Jon’s eyesight begins to fail... From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will gain something in return. Thus, in spite of going blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.

An ordinary working day on a construction site. Thomas, a 40-year-old crane operator, receives a call from his wife asking him to pick her up from the hospital. He finds her crying.