Now or Never

Prostitutes, drunks, gays, senior citizens, and children, pass through one of the world's most famous parks.

Eva Ebner is a Berliner who gives the appearance of being rather eccentric. She knows the film business inside out – regardless of whether she’s work- ing behind the camera as an assistant director or in front of it as an actor. Her name is closely associated with a series of now-legendary adaptations of Edgar Wallace’s crime novels which were made in Germany during the 1960s. Upcoming young directors from local film schools have also profited from Ms. Ebner’s unbroken enthusiasm and passion for film. However, this eighty-year-old has a more than broken relationship to the events of her childhood and youth in Gdansk – a time when her life was characterised by an anti-Semitic step-mother and the dangers posed by the Nazi regime. This film portrait does not eschew any of the long dark shadows of that era, nor does it sidestep any friction between portrayer and his subject. (Lothar Lambert)

An elderly actress takes a young gardener as a lover and attract a lot of odd attention.

A Berlin woman in her early thirties is trying to handle her psychological problems and childhood trauma with the help of her psychiatrist. She is ashamed and overwhelmed by her masochistic sex fantasies.

A simple tax collector suffers from a deep depression. He flies from his dominant mother to a dangerous company in violent left-wing circles. And discovers a cure for his impotence.

Two shady businessmen set out to shake up the West Berlin funeral industry - with unconventional ideas and questionable methods. To this end, they take over the business of a long-established mortician who wants to retire. One of them also hooks up with the colorless daughter of the chairman of the local mortician's association in order to get money and his father's customer list from her. Meanwhile, his partner has to deal with his wife and their equally nagging children. And then the establishment strikes back. At the same time, the unmarried newcomer to the industry discovers that he does have real feelings for the association chairman's daughter.

A Turkish woman with a Marilyn Monroe obsession hooks up with her new neighbor, an Arab. Although the young man occasionally intones Elvis Presley songs to the guitar, as requested by her, the relationship soon falls into crisis, especially since the fun-loving single mother also begins an affair with a blonde who bears a vague resemblance to Monroe. The love potions are watched curiously and commented on by other residents of the Kreuzberg apartment building.

Anyone who is keen to capture Berlin’s most original characters on film is bound to end up at Sylvia Heidemann’s door. Sylvia has saved up every penny of her reparation money to appear just once in her life on the silver screen like Greta Garbo. It just so happens that the Viennese filmmaker Andersch and Madame Heidemann are staying at the same hotel and it’s not long before the two strike a bargain.

Director İsmet Elçi tells the semi-autobiographical story of Kemal (played by Elçi himself), who negotiates his identity between two cultures (Turkey and Germany), struggling to find a future as a director in the German film industry.

Berlin Underground-star Ulrike S. went to the Toronto-Filmfestival and then to New York - to find out something about the film business and also about her own desires, daydreams and nightmares.

A West Berlin couple hopes to solve their marital problems while on vacation in Spain. Instead, the tensions between the neglected and misunderstood woman and her annoyed and otherwise unsatisfied husband escalate soon afterwards. She starts an affair with her Persian masseur, he falls in love with a mute toilet attendant, whom he brings back to Berlin and takes in with himself and his two pubescent children, while the woman moves in with her masseur. But even the new constellations quickly get into crisis.

Rita, the prostitute, meets the Lebanese worker Hossein. He need working papers. She needs love.

Manfred, who is fascinated by his mother's underwear, becomes the latest addition to Dr Prinz's therapeutic flat-share for transvestites and sexual 'deviants'. During his inspection visits, to prove solidarity with his patients, Dr Prinz himself happily cross-dresses and applies abundant make-up.

The actor Holger Miesbach can no longer pursue this or any other profession, for psychological reasons and despite ongoing psychiatric treatment. While his mother offers telephone sex, where she pretends to be a minor and always forgets to get paid, he devotes himself to painting, but above all to his childhood passion for collecting autographs. When the actress Gloria Mundi, who had celebrated success as a teenager with revealing scenes, but who had killed her mother and her lover in Hollywood in 1961, returns to Berlin, Holger's penchant for the washed-up star becomes obsessive.

The plot centers around a director’s ruined film – most of which was inadvertently destroyed at the lab. It is a wild mosaic of startling imagery including a safe-sex foot fucking scene with toes in a condom, a woman flasher, and a woman voyeur in a wheelchair who comments on the street life near a public toilet.