Arcadia Public Library

What have we learned (and what might we have forgotten) from history's bloody backwash? Guilt, love, and history are three skeins, woven together to create human beings or, alternately, human monsters. The question of wartime culpability undergirds the May-December romance in postwar Berlin between Hanna, a weary-looking, sexually rapacious streetcar ticket-taker and Michael, a young schoolboy whom she seduces, ravenously and to his great delight....

After WWII, Berlin lies in ruins. For Gustav, Willi and their friends the rubble provides an adventurous, dangerous playground. For Gustav it also helps pass the time, as he longs for his father’s return from a POW camp. One day a stranger arrives, looking helpless and hopeless…Gerhard Lamprecht built his reputation in the 1930s with socially-critical Berlin films based on the drawings of Heinrich Zille, and hits like Emil and the Detectives (1931,...

In 1945, after three years in a concentration camp, the artist Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef) returns to a Berlin in ruins. Shot in the rubble of Berlin just a year after WWII, The Murderers Are among Us was the first film made in Germany after the war and has since become a classic antifascist and rubble film. Its film noir style successfully blends German expressionism with striking neorealism. Despite Susanne's unspeakable experiences, she is...

Set in the international world of classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra.

This playlist includes the following special features from Kuhle wampe or Who owns the world, How the Berlin worker lives (dir. Slatan Dudow, 1930) Slatan Dudow: a film about a marxist artist (dir. Volker Koepp, 1974) original prologue, with Herbert Jhering, 1958.

The first German feature film to explicitly address the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, Marriage in the shadows called on Germans to accept collective responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. Stylistically, the production, in which many former Ufa artists were involved, blends classic melodrama in the Ufa style with documentary glimpses into life in Berlin under the Nazis. Shown in all four sectors of occupied Berlin and across Germany,...

Shortly before GDR’s collapse, Helke Misselwitz traveled by train from one end of the country to the other interviewing East German women of different ages and backgrounds. In this documentary masterpiece, women reveal their personal and professional frustrations, hopes and aspirations—and, in doing so, paint a portrait of a changing society. The landscape and architecture of East Germany, filmed in B&W on 35mm by Thomas Plenert, form the background...

Gregor is a young soldier entering Germany with the victorious Soviet troops at the end of WWII. But he is also the child of left-wing Germans who fled from Hitler and spent the war in the Soviet Union. As a result, his return to Germany is ambivalent; he finds he is a stranger in his own land. Film critics rank Konrad Wolf's most autobiographical film among the 100 Most Significant German Films of all time. As they enter Germany, Gregor begins to...

In his bittersweet comedy loaded with human quirks and nuance, Jacob invents news reports to bolster the spirits of the other Jews living in his Polish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1977, the story was remade in Hollywood starring Robin Williams in 1999. In a Polish ghetto in 1944, Jacob Heym is summoned to the police station. While there, Jacob overhears on the radio that "the Russians are twenty...