Der Schah und der Ayatollah

A sensual approach to culinary art "on the ground", meeting farmers, winegrowers, restaurateurs and cooks, where gastronomy and the art of living have their roots.

The film traces the conflict between General Wojciech Jaruzelski and the electrician Lech Wałęsa. Close companions and contemporary witnesses have their say in the documentary, providing an insight into this important chapter of contemporary European history.

The documentary shows Maria Callas playing “Tosca”, at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1964. The event gained proportion due to the expectation of her return to the stage.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would have been 100 years in October 2019. The Shah's story begins with good ideas and ideals and ends in bloody chaos. On the one hand, he helped carry Iran into modernity. His wealth was legendary, and his marriages made tabloid headlines for years. However, his name also stands for a time of human rights violations, vicious oppression and intolerance.

The "Carnival of the Animals" is Camille Saint-Saëns' best-known piece. Saint-Saëns did not want it to be published. On the 100th anniversary of the composer's death in December 2021, the documentary reports on the circumstances under which the piece of music was created, tells of Saint-Saëns' life and how the "Carnival of the Animals" ultimately became an evergreen in the music world.

The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.

October 2018 was the four-hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The documentary traces the story of how it was finally brought to an end with the peace of Munster and Osnabruck – the first peace in European history to be concluded at the negotiating table and not fought on the battlefield.

The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.

The two navigators, Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake, shared the same ambition: to circumnavigate the globe by ship, in the service of their countries, Spain and England, which hoped to gain political and economic supremacy from the feat.

Since time immemorial, we have used images to form a picture of the world. But never before has there been as much filming and photography as there is currently. But how do people deal with it when the world and its image merge? The filmmakers Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer show how quickly and profoundly the way we deal with images is changing. Will we eventually move into a world in which reality and image can no longer be distinguished from each other?

The composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is still a shining light today. But behind his radiant aura lies a dark shadow. His life was full of contradictions. During the "Third Reich", he was president of the Reich Chamber of Music and at the same time protector of the Jewish part of his family. Who was this Richard Strauss?

300 years before globalized communication and long before Facebook and Instagram, Leibniz had "friends" all over the world - more than 1,300 mail partners. For the cultural scientist Joseph Vogl from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Leibniz's way of working was something of an "information processing machine". Most of his estate is in Hanover, where Leibniz worked as a librarian and consultant at the Duke's court for 40 years. Leibniz has written so much in his life that so far only a part of the total of 200,000 pages has been recorded and published. It is expected that everything will be edited in 2055. Who was this Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who said of himself: "Whoever knows me only from my published writings does not know me"? The film searches for Leibniz as a person. The documentary portrays the genius Leibniz in his time and always brings him back to our present. Different people have their say, and their work would not be possible without Leibniz.

An intimate portrait of the legendary pianist Murray Perahia. The documentary observes Perahia at work on the interpretation of some pieces by Chopin and Schumann. It shows him as conductor of the famous Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, follows him into the recording studio and a master class in Hanover and finally captures a concert performance at a Warsaw Chopin recital in February 2010.