Films Directed by Women

Berlin, 1974. Grischa and Heinrich are actors, accidentally locked in the rehearsal hall one night. He tries to seduce her; she's puts him off. Later she dumps her husband and sleeps with Heinrich, who ups the ante by suggesting they have a child. She takes him seriously by initiating a journalistic project interviewing working mothers, asking how they balance work and family, delving into their sexual histories. Heinrich sulks when she spends evenings on the project, he's childish. Should she leave him? The story plays out against the backdrop of left-wing political agitation.

A biopic by Helma Sanders-Brahm on the life of the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist. The film is based upon his letters, documents and literary works. This film won the Deutscher Filmpreis in 1977 making Sanders-Brahm the first female director to win it.

A look at the lives of 19th-century composers Clara and Robert Schumann.

本片和宫崎骏的《天空之城》没有任何关系。这是德国女导演
Helma Sanders-Brahms作品，女主角Krystyna Janda获1986年蒙特利尔电影节最佳女演员奖。
A French architect and a Polish photographer enjoy a love affair and meet regularly in Berlin for passionate weekends. Unable to decide whether they should start a steady relationship, they permanently break up with each other. The title is allegorical, in that West Berlin is named Laputa, the flying island that Jonathan Swift once wrote about.

In order to be reunited with Mahmood (Ören), a man she was promised to as a young girl, 20-year-old Shirin (Erten) leaves the life she had in a small village in Turkey in search of him.

The life of Jewish Expressionist poet and performance artist, Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945), told chronologically in vignettes given context by archival footage of turn-of-the-century Germany, World War I, and the ascent of the Third Reich. Her poetry often comprises the soundtrack. We see her in relation to men: her first husband, whom she leaves after her son is born; artists like Chagall and Franz Marc; an older muse and then a second husband; and, Gottfried Benn (1886 - 1956), physician and poet. Benn's life is also chronicled: homosexual encounters, his attraction to Else and the Berlin scene, and his politics. Her poems addressed to him define this cultural moment.

Tutor Jeronimo and heiress Josephe fall in love but are quickly torn from one another by execution and jail. However, when fate intervenes in the form of a massive earthquake, the two lovers have no idea what is in store for them.

Emily, a child, stays with her bourgeois grandparents during frequent periods when her mother makes films. Isabelle wraps a picture, flies to her childhood home to pick up Emily, and plans to leave for her place in France. Old wounds between Isabelle and her parents open around Isabelle's life style. It's also apparent that Isabelle's mother, Paula, is unhappy - with her husband and with her youthful hopes dashed when she became pregnant with Isabelle. Unbeknownst to Isabelle, the co-star of the film she's just made has followed her, checked into a nearby hotel, and wants to begin an affair, even though he's married. Can Isabelle sort it out? What's best for Emily?

Her only foray into science fiction—about the havoc wrought on society by a television that satisfies every human craving—The Last Days of Gomorrah was a favorite of Sanders-Brahms, who brought feminist politics to the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. It is a forceful piece of capitalist realism, critiquing working-class alienation and commodity culture.

When East Germany ceases to be separate from its western half, one would think that things would be better for the couple in this movie who have been plagued by sexual and political harassment of the most virulent kind, but , they are completely unprepared to cope with the swift changes that are transforming their familiar yet desperately unhappy world. In the story, Heinz is a laborer in the cooperative apple orchards of an East German village and has married his sweetheart Lena. She works to take care of the sickly wife of the co-op's manager and also must cope with the sexual attentions of the perfidious man. One day, after discovering this state of affairs, Heinz blows up and assaults his wife's harasser, which only serves to land him in jail. While in prison, the state secret police (the Stasi) get him to help them entrap the co-op manager, whom they believe is going to try to defect.

1988 film by Helma Sanders-Brahms

deutscher Spielfilm

Deutsches TV-Drama

Egor is a vet at a training facility for hunting dogs in a remote region of the country. Surrounded by foxes, deer, badgers, and dogs, he lives in a small building next to the house of the facility's master. He treats the dogs, cleans the kennels, oversees the workers, and meets with clients and their dogs. It's easier for him to get along with dogs than with people. Egor is willing to take on any job to get closer to the facility's master and his near and dear. He wants the impossible - to become a member of that family.

Industrial city of Norilsk: factories, cold, chemical air. The only desire of young people living here is to leave, against all odds. A docu-style, emotionally-driven drama about a young girl desperately fighting for an escape which is so blurry, and for love which is so insecure.
Due to its vast industrial areas and enormous industrial output, the Russian city of Norilsk has become one of the most polluted places in the world. However, despite the persistent ecological crisis, the severe northern climate and harsh living conditions, life goes on there in its own extreme, as well as routine, way. But the will to live that such an existence fosters is actually the will, or rather the dream, to escape, especially for a young generation. A desperate, hardly possible dream that moves and traps its adherents, turning against them.
Norilsk, with its arctic landscapes, huge factories, anonymous soviet architecture and post-soviet capitalism, is the gripping backdrop and important protagonist of The Hope Factory, the first feature by Natalia Meschaninova, a young filmmaker with an extensive background in documentaries. A dramatic coming-of-age story about two girls - two rivals who pursue the same goal of leaving their homeland but who take different steps to reach it, testing the blurring boundaries of morality and transgression.
Restlessly shot on a hand-held camera and genuinely performed by mostly first-time actors, this kinetic docudrama nearly gets under the skin of its characters and raises universal issues about the 'age of blooming'.

A lyrical comedy about elderly people who meet on a dog playground, quarrel terribly, but this conflict ignites mutual interest in them.

A psychology postgraduate student escorts two patients and their nurse to a seaside psychiatric clinic. Along their journey, they break through each other's barriers, delve into the sources of their various traumas, and discover the lasting imprints left on their fragile souls.

The trees are covered in thick snow. A peaceful group of hunters tramp through the forest. At night they celebrate their kill. A group of men sworn to their own ethics of the dignity of all creatures. It’s only in the death of the opposite they aimed at that they find respect for the existence of the killed game, for which this violent end of life is the beginning of an existence as an object. Mounted and worked on with extreme skill until they once more resemble the vibrant “before”, the carcasses are processed and made suitable for the human eye and its desire to feast on things. Former but never quite gone deer, muskrats and birds look at you.
The line between the life and death of these animals seems to get blurred in the course of the film, only to be drawn even more strongly. The adoration of the wilderness of tamed nature in rituals of presentation made for humans clearly follows different logics than the comfortable and presentable one of keeping pets. Dead eyes do not look back.

Based on a Soviet propaganda story about Young Pioneer (the Soviet equivalent of a Boy Scout) Morozov, who denounced his father to Stalin’s secret police and was in turn killed by his family. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to become informers, at any expense. In our film, 75 years later, we call him little Janis. He is a Pioneer who lives on the Soviet collective farm “Dawn”. His father is an enemy of the farm (and the Soviet system) and plots against it. Little Janis betrays his father; his father takes revenge upon his son. Who then in this old Soviet tale is good and who is bad? This film reveals that a distorted brain is always dangerous. Even today.

The late 1950s. Every night, Soviet tractors comb the coast of Latvia looking for signs of anyone who could have infiltrated the Soviet border from the sea. One morning, three Soviet patrolmen discover a woman’s shoe in the sand and footsteps leading to the quaint little village of Liepaja.