An inexperienced young actress is invited to play a role in a film based on Dostoyevsky's 'The Possessed'. The film director, a Czech immigrant in Paris, takes over her life, and in a short time she is unable to draw the line between acting and reality. She winds up playing a real-life role posing as the dead wife of another Czech immigrant, who is manipulated by the filmmaker into commiting a political assassination.

An American gangster (Gulager) arrives in a small town in the south of Sweden. He establishes himself as a kind of politician/preacher, promising great changes in the community. Only a few people suspect that his intentions are evil.

A man lives with his family in a small community. He is seen as a deviant, abnormal person by society.

A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

Nastassia is a woman amongst four men. One is her protector another the Idiot, the one who loves her madly. All four, and some others, meet at a party at Nastassia. Nobody will decide for her: she will choose the outcome.

Dagny Juell was the doctors daughter who left Kongsvinger for Berlin to study music, and became famous painter Edvard Munchs mistress.

A middle-aged antique dealer and money lender recollects his marriage to a 17-year-old orphan girl.

Britt Malm gets hit by a car on a Stockholm street and is taken to hospital. She is badly injured and must undergo surgery. While the anesthetic takes effect she sees hallucinatory images. This turns into a flashback of what happened Britt before the accident.

The story about the thief who didn't get crucified because Jesus was choosen to take his place.

A married couple of artists move to a utopian town known for its absolute freedom, but behind the surface perversion and violence are spreading.

Teresa is like a child. She is frustrated with her childless existence and suspects her husband of being unfaithful. She and her husband play games with each other, tempting fate.

Doktor Glas face ethical complications when a woman, Helga Gregorius, asks for help in preventing her husband, the disgusting Pastor Gregorius, to have sex with her.

A weak and tormented teacher is pushed to the limit by his obnoxious students.

Sweden, 1782. Jacob, a young noble, somewhat wild and vehement, returns from his studies in France. After his absence, he returns home happy, but is even happier of meeting his beloved sister Charlotte again. However, she has been promised to the Baron Alsmeden, a man of great influence at court, and this fact will awake a feeling like jealousy in Jacob.

In 1890, Pontus, the starving writer, wanders the streets of Christiania, in search of love and a chance to get his work published. All he meets is defeat and suffering while his sense of reality is withering. One moment he is delighted and the next he curses everybody. All the time he manages to maintain human dignity and pride.

A lonely night watchman at a department store develops a fixation on one of the store's mannequins. He soon steals her and brings her to his home, where he can be with her all the time. One day, she comes to life...

Li and Hans are colleagues at an advertising agency. Even though Hans is married, they start a relationship. Li hopes that Hans will tell his wife the truth about them and leave her for Li.

"Wild birds" - A Swedish film noir with the character of a French noir ('Quai des brumes', 'Le jour se lève'). Two worlds meet for a brief experience of happiness ended by a violent tragedy. In one world the unhappy prostitute (Ulla) finds a drunken young man (Nisse) who had previously failed in many occupations. She takes him home. Her feelings are like those for a younger brother.

An essay film in which filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim interviews "the willing victims of Rainer Werner Fassbinder."

August Strindberg in Paris divorced from his wife, children and friends. In the company of Parisian artists and writers, including Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, but often he feel they ridicule and persecute him. Isolated Strindberg venture successfully in alchemical experiments.

A woman's unfulfilling marriage leads her into a passionate affair with a wealthy extramarital lover.

In a Scandinavian insane asylum, murderer Salem sneaks out at night to exact his revenge on those who he deems responsible for his predicament.

A biographical romance about the famous Russian writer.

Baal explores the cult of the genius, an anti-heroic figure who chooses to be a social outcast and live on the fringe of bourgeois morality.

Small-time pimp Franz is torn between his mistress and Bruno, the gangster sent after him by a shady crime syndicate he's refused to join.

Berta, a naive young maid, searches for love when the army engineers come to town to build a bridge.

Michel and Guenther, working in dead-end jobs, are obsessed with going to Peru to find buried treasure, using a map of the Rio das Mortes. Michel's girlfriend, Hanna, humors their plan, but really just wants to get married.

Tensions between members of a film crew build while they wait for the arrival of the director and star to arrive on location.

"Whity" is the mulatto butler of the dysfunctional Nicholson family in the American southwest in 1878. The father, Ben Nicholson, has an attractive young wife Katherine, and two sons by a previous marriage; the homosexual Frank, and the retarded Davy. Whity tries to carry out all their orders, however demeaning, until various of the family members ask him to kill some of the others.

A successful fashion designer abandons a sado-masochistic relationship with her female assistant in favor of a love affair with a beautiful young woman.

A very stylized TV version of the Fassbinder play. The set consists of a few pieces of furniture in front of a large screen on which coastal scenery is back projected. Geesche is a nineteenth century woman who wants to have a mind of her own. She defies convention and will do anything to achieve her freedom from oppression by her family and friends. (synopsis written by Will Gilbert)

When 17-year-old Effi Briest marries the elderly Baron von Instetten, she moves to a small, isolated Baltic town and a house that she fears is haunted. Starved for companionship, Effi begins an innocent friendship with Major Crampas, a charismatic womanizer.

Maria marries a young soldier in the last days of World War II, only for him to go missing in the war. She must rely on her beauty and ambition to navigate the difficult post-war years alone.

Olga and Ruth become friends. Olga is independent, separated from her husband, living with an immigrant pianist, and teaching feminist literature. Ruth is withdrawn, a painter, possibly mentally ill. Ruth dreams in black and white, sometimes of her suicide. Olga lectures on a 19th-century writer, von Günderrode, a suicide after the breakup of her intense friendship with Bettina Brentano. Ruth's husband Franz encourages the women's friendship, then, as Olga draws Ruth out and the friendship deepens, he becomes jealous. After the women travel to Egypt, Franz has a tirade. Ruth seems crushed between her husband and her friend, and how she responds is the film's climax.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

This erotic drama about the incestuous relationship of a mother and daughter is based on the autobiography of Italian theater actress Piera Degli Esposti.

The story about a couple who do not want to have children of their own, and a pregnant, single woman who needs a home for a while, the relationship between the three protagonists is strange, at the very least.

Story of the owners (Mastroianni and Schygulla) of a fancy nightclub in Budapest before and during WWII.

Mrs. Forbes, a German governess, is hired for six weeks to take care of two children, while their parents are away. She is authoritarian and repressive, so the children plan to murder her. But when they spy on her during the night, they discover Mrs. Forbes' secret.

In Paris, unhappy movie actress Catherine Crachat becomes infatuated with the mathematician Pierre Indemini, but then breaks up with him. After a film shoot in Vienna, Catherine stays with a rich admirer, Fanny Hohenstein. Fanny has a history of many lovers of both sexes, two of whom killed themselves over her.

An allegory of the Golem, a Jewish mythical creature personifying displacement and exile, this film tells the story of a woman (similar to the biblical Ruth) and her sisters, who are forced into exile after the death of their husbands. It is set in 1990s Paris, where the director was living in self-imposed exile following the ban on his 1982 documentary in Israel. The recurring theme of the film is migrations and unrooting, like the legendary Golem.

Winter travel.

What does ‘normal’ actually mean? And what is ‘crazy’? Everybody attempts to convince Léa that her mother, Suzanne, is mentally ill. Her father wants to see her returned to the psychiatric clinic, but Léa refuses to see her mother in the same light: Suzanne is happy – even if she doesn’t act like others expect her to. She appears to live a joyfully infantile existence after calmly letting go of life’s pressures. Léa captures her mother’s life on film and focuses her attention on examining the old super-8 films from the family archives. When she is left to drive her mother back to the clinic after a weekend at home, Léa grabs her opportunity: She turns the car around and whisks Suzanne off on a journey; a road trip without the judgements of others. AVANTI follows a mother-daughter relationship with an ease and depth that highlights the complexity of the emotional ties within a family.

Telenovela in six chapters adapted from the original screenplay by Gabriel García Marquez, directed by Ruy Guerra and shot in Cuba in 1991.

A writer struggles with her daughter's decision to drop out of college and live on the streets.

Diagnosed with a terminal disease an angst-ridden woman is seeking therapy to be treated with Psilocybin (from magic mushrooms) and meditation where she is transferred to her subconscious, confronting her old self and her former husband.

Wilhelm Wilder (Will) is a talented actor stuck on a New York City children's TV show where he portrays Bad Luck Bunny, a hapless green rabbit. Feeling a failure, he bears his fate with touching self-irony, but grows sulky and petulant when he thinks that his wife, daughter and all his friends have forgotten his 40th birthday. In the confusion following a road accident, all the world believes he is dead. Instead of rectifying the situation, he decides to fulfill a fantasy and attend his own funeral. Here he will learn what everyone really thinks of him. With the aid of his best friend Rad, an Indian restaurant-owner, Will becomes Vijay Singh, a handsome and gentlemanly Sikh, complete with turban and beard. Will confronts a unique problem: everyone likes Vijay, and most of all, he likes Vijay, more than he ever liked himself. (Sam Garbarski)

A despairing scholar sells his soul to Satan in exchange for one night with a beautiful young woman.

A Turkish man travels to Istanbul to find the daughter of his father's former girlfriend.

"Promised Land" tells the story of a group of young unwitting Estonian girls smuggled through Egypt to be auctioned off as prostitutes in Israel, and of their initiation into this trade of flesh, and finally of the accidental freeing of one girl who most fight for her freedom.

Two very different love stories cross each other in warm and magical way. A humanistic and yet mysterious film about love and death near the German/Danish border.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

After her fighter pilot boyfriend commits suicide by crashing his jet into the ocean, a Greek fashion model reflects on their relationship and how it started, developed, then deteriorated. After a long bout of depression over his death, she learns that he may not be dead after all. Why would he have kept himself hidden from her, and will she ever be able to find him again?

Encouraged by Fassbinder, with whom he became friendly after the then-enfant terrible of the German cinema visited him in Lugano, Sirk also did some teaching during the late 1970s at the film school in Munich, where he made three short films with his students.

A company of Spanish movie makers leaves Franco's Spain and moves to Hitler's Germany to make a film in co-production. Soon some problems start to arise...

Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.

51-year-old Herbert Strehlow, a furniture restorer, falls in love with 21-year-old Lea, who has not spoken a word since childhood when her father killed her mother. She bears a striking resemblance to Herbert's dead wife. They get married, but their relationship seems doomed, until gradually each one manages to penetrate the mysterious world of the other, and they begin to realize that they are bound by a kind of spiritual relationship. For Lea it is the death of her mother, for Herbert it is the death of his first wife. His hard exterior slowly beings to thaw, and he starts to show feelings and responses that soften Lea's initial hatred and fear of him, and which put their relationship in a more positive light.

Ernest, Ted and August fulfill their friend Carl's dying wish and take him to Heidelberg, where they all first met 45 years ago, to see his old girlfriend one last time. However, the locals won't talk about her, due to a WW2 secret.

Monsieur Cinema, a hundred years old, lives alone in a large villa. His memories fade away, so he engages a young woman to tell him stories about all the movies ever made.

Mavi Sürgün is a fictionalized account of one period of the life of a Turkish journalist who was condemned to exile for an article he wrote in 1925. He turned his punishment into a reward by creating a little paradise in what is today the holiday resort, Bodrum. In fact he is considered by some to be the first ecologist. The film concentrates on this latter aspect of his character and through flashbacks portrays the inner turmoil of a man who is trying to come to terms with his past. The slow pace is somewhat of a drawback, the flashbacks are often confusing and the protagonist is not always very convincing. But the photography of the country side is exceptional Kenan Ormanlar and the short appearance by a very theatrical Hanna Schygulla of Fassbinder fame adds a little spice to the drama.

A house is opened in spring where some men and women in search of love are living.Life has different means for them.

In the winter of 1943 two young Jews, Alek and Fryda, escape, via sewer tunnels, from the atrocities underway in Warsaw ghetto. Alek, entrusted with undeveloped photos of the horrors within, makes his way to a supposedly safe apartment only to find it occupied by Germans. Another tenant, a pole Stephania, abruptly offers to shelter him in her spacious apartment. She comforts him and they make love that very night. Stefania is uncommonly generous and willing to jeopardize her own safety by hiding a Jew. She even goes to a nearby church and rescues Fryda. But Fryda is ungrateful and proceeds to sabotage the trio's safety in insidious ways.

A woman who has lost her memory is taken in by a Los Angeles orphanage, and a private eye is enlisted to track down her identity, but he soon finds that he might have a past life connection to her that endangers their lives.

A beautiful novelist gets involved with the violent underworld crime elements in New York City and becomes a target. Alec Baldwin plays the cop who pursues her killers.

After a plane is hijacked by terrorists, The Delta Force is sent in to resolve the crisis.

Biopic of Peter I, Czar of Russia, from childhood in 1682 to the Great Northern War against Sweden during the 1700s.

A film director has an inspirational crisis while working on the production, Passion, and struggles with the nature of work and art.

In June of 1791, a group of passengers in a stagecoach find themselves caught up in the events of the French Revolution, when they find themselves in the city of Varennes when revolutionists arrest the fleeing King Louis.

Anna is a psychologist undertaking research about famous suicidal women. She takes a specific interest in the case of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who killed herself in 1931 in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.

A German journalist, escaping from broken marriage, goes to Lebanon to cover the civil war. Soon, he realizes that he can't handle the truth.

In late-1920s Berlin, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and vows to go straight. However, he soon finds himself embroiled in the city's criminal underworld.

A wildly anarchic satire of guerrilla terrorism in which a band of leftist radicals inadvertently become puppets of the West German government, which uses them to justify its authoritarian policies.

Hans Schnier has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism.

A writer goes on a road trip across West Germany with a group of eclectic people he meets along the way.

Based on Franz Xaver Kroetz's play, which is in turn based on a true story, this film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder tells the story of a very young girl who, after persuading a local boy to become her lover, induces the anger of her father, whose incestuous sexual attentions to her have grown unbearable.

The young toolmaker Jochen fights with his colleagues to a performance bonus. He gets to know the girl Marion. For both, it is love at first sight.

Inspired by the real life events of Mathias Kneißl, a marginal man, son of poor farmers from Bavaria, in the late XIX Century. Mathias stole from the riches to give to the poor, becoming a hero for the rural people, and a popular social rebel. He was chased by the police until his unfortunate sentence.

Adaptation of Robert Walser's novel about a young man who enters an oppressive servant school.

Hans Epp is a self-destructive man who lives a dissatisfied life. He tries to find meaning as a fruit vendor, but a heart attack impedes his ability to work, which turns his dissatisfaction into despair.

The life of a married Munich technical draftsman with a son.

Can a small group of people start a proletarian revolution, asks the "Black Monk" in a leather jacket. The medieval shepherd, Hans Boehm, claims to have been called by the Virgin Mary to create a revolt against the church and the landowners. The "Black Monk" suggests that he would have more success if he dressed up Johanna and had her appear as the Virgin Mary.

People meet and chat at Ridolfo's Coffeehouse. The conversations are mostly about money. But also about feelings, ideals, friendship, love, fidelity and respectability.

A man is released from prison and finds the society on the outside less than appealing. With several women as well as the police on his tail, he sets out to find an old friend.

A group of young slackers spend most of their time hanging out in front of a Munich apartment building. When a Greek immigrant named Jorgos moves in, however, their aimless lives are shaken up. Soon new tensions arise both within the group and with Jorgos.

Abram returns to his small village and although his repairing skills are needed, people's suspicion about his sexual preferences make his life hard.

Three sequences are linked together in this short film by Straub; the first sequence is a long tracking shot from a car of prostitutes plying their trade on the night-time streets of Germany; the second is a staged play, cut down to 10 minutes by Straub and photographed in a single take; the final sequence covers the marriage of James and Lilith, and Lilith’s subsequent execution of her pimp, played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "The film is a look entirely at Western decadence" - Jean-Marie Straub.

This documentary film describes the inauguration of the monument to the Russian writer Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg.

Dostoevsky seen through the prism of his relationships, and his struggles with poverty, trial, exile and imprisonment in Omsk, Siberia, writings, gambling.

The story of a German singer named Willie who while working in Switzerland falls in love with a Jewish composer named Robert whose family is helping people to flee from the Nazis. Robert’s family is skeptical of Willie, thinking she could be a Nazi as she becomes famous for singing the song “Lili Marleen”.

Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-law student, kills an old pawnbroker and her sister, perhaps for money, perhaps to prove a theory about being above the law. He comes to police attention through normal procedures (he was the victim's client), but his outbursts make him the prime suspect of the clever Porfiry. Meanwhile, life swirls around Raskolnikov: his mother and sister come to the city followed by two older men seeking his sister's hand; he meets a drunken clerk who is then killed in a traffic accident, and he falls in love with the man's daughter, Sonia, a young prostitute. She urges him to confess, promising to follow him to Siberia. Will he accept responsibility? (From IMDB Crime and Punishment (1970))

Starring Jeremy Irons in a one-man drama, adapted from a Dostoevsky short story by Murray Watts. In his dream, the Man visits an unspoilt Garden of Eden.

Hitparkut (Dissolution) combines an almost surreal fairy-tale energy with brutal black and white realism to explore the condition of violence which permeates contemporary Israeli society. Shot is Yafo (the predominantly Arab area of Tel Aviv), the movie follows the moral collapse and first glimmer of redemption, of a young, morose Israeli Jew, played by Israeli actor Didi Fire

A loose Communist adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel.