In postwar Germany, a displaced Czech boy, separated from his family during wartime, is befriended by an American GI while the boy's mother desperately searches for him.
In occupied Berlin, a US Army Captain is torn between an ex-Nazi cafe singer and the US Congresswoman investigating her.
Long before he played the corpulent Goldfinger, German actor Gert Froebe was a scarecrow-skinny comedian. In Berliner Ballade, Froebe makes his screen debut as Otto, a feckless Everyman who 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. Director R. A. Stemmle doesn't have to strive for pathos: he merely places his gangly star amidst the ruins of a bombed-out Berlin, and the point is made for him. Filmed in 1948, Berliner Ballade was later released in the U.S. as The Berliner.
Jeff Elliot is an American GI investigating a black market gang in Munich.
This James A. FitzPatrick Traveltalks short visits the West German cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Munich, and Heidelberg. Included are scenes of World War II destruction that lingered at the time.
An American army officer working for British intelligence comes to post-war Berlin to solve a murder. His investigation is compromised when he falls for a nightclub singer, not realising she is an agent of the criminal mastermind he is on the trail of.
In melodramatic fashion, the film tells the tale of a young German woman who finds herself alone in the world when the rest of her family is killed in a WWII air raid. Helping an American military man escape the Gestapo, she finds herself on the run from the Russian Army. Escaping to the American (and safe) side of Berlin, she registers herself as a prostitute (unknowingly) and finds herself caught between the German officer who thinks she is for sale and the American officer who she saved and is now in love with her.
A young American serviceman stationed in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, jeopardises his future after falling in love with a German woman.
Intercutting dramatic vignettes with newsreel footage, the story follows the characters from an infantry squad as they make their way from Sicily to Germany during the end of World War II.
Munich, 1968: a period of liberation, student revolts, state repression. Amidst the restlessness, chemistry student Robbie meets the Irish cello player Nancy. They feel compelled to pursue a passion in spite of their careers. But does romantic love have a place in such convoluted, contesting times?
An American ex-WW II POW returns to Germany 30 years after the war. He teams up with the former commander of his prison camp. Together they spring a Nazi war criminal from jail. He's the only one left who knows where a secret wartime cache of gold is hidden.
Post-war Germany in 1946 while people are struggling to make ends meet, the film follows Hermann, a war veteran who finds employment at a train station. As he falls in love with an agricultural worker and starts comitting thefts, his fragile psyche seems to fall more and more out of balance.
In 1986, Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and Marilyn Levine were making a film about the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, when the imposing structure was still very much intact as the world’s most visible symbol of hardline Communism and Cold War lore. They thought they were making a documentary on the community of tourists, soldiers, and West Berliners who lived in the seemingly eternal presence of the graffiti emblazoned eyesore. But in 1989, as the original film neared completion, the Wall came down, and McElwee and Levine returned to Berlin, this time to capture the radically different atmosphere of the reunified city.
In 1966, Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, captured, and, down to 85 pounds, escaped. Barefoot, surviving monsoons, leeches, and machete-wielding villagers, he was rescued. Now, near 60, living on Mt. Tamalpais, Dengler tells his story: a German lad surviving Allied bombings in World War II, postwar poverty, apprenticed to a smith, beaten regularly. At 18, he emigrates and peels potatoes in the U.S. Air Force. He leaves for California and college, then enlistment in the Navy to learn to fly. A quiet man of sorrows tells his story: war, capture, harrowing conditions, escape, and miraculous rescue. Where did he find the strength; how does he now live with his memories? The director would use this subject for the feature film Rescue Dawn (2007).
In this film essay, critic Peter Buchka explores the German cinema of the 1920s, ranging from the disquieting images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the castrating sexuality of Marlene Dietrich in Die Blaue Engel. The program provides an introduction to Weimar cinema, with Buchka's essay narrated over the images from film clips of 1920s era German films.
A "What if?" alternative history sees Nazi Germany prevailing in the second World War. First the occupiers establish their power bases, before they find themselves under attack from the underground resistance.
A biography of Hildegard Knef, one of Germany's biggest post-war stars.
A young prosecutor in postwar West Germany investigates a massive conspiracy to cover up the Nazi pasts of prominent public figures.