Eric Friedler

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Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.

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"Wings Of Desire" and "Buena Vista Social Club", "Paris, Texas" and "The State Of Things": Wim Wenders is considered one of the pioneers of New German Cinema and one of the most important and influential representatives of contemporary cinema. With never-before-shown archive material and extraordinary encounters with companions and contemporary witnesses such as Francis Ford Coppola, Willem Dafoe, Andie MacDowell, Hanns Zischler, Patti Smith, and Werner Herzog, this documentary provides unique insights into the life and work of one of the most multifaceted artists of our times. Renowned documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler ("It Must Schwing. The Blue Note Story") and his co-director Andreas Frege were given the exclusive opportunity to portray Wenders for this film. From Düsseldorf to Paris, and all the way to the desert of Texas, the film traces iconic locations and decisive moments in Wenders' work as director, producer, photographer, and author.

Explores Jerry Lewis' unreleased 1972 film "The Day the Clown Cried," its mysterious disappearance, and the search for footage. Includes interviews with Lewis' associates and previously unseen production content.

2010 documentary film on the Armenian Genocide by the Young Turk government of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It is based on eyewitness reports by European and American personnel stationed in the Near East at the time, Armenian survivors and other contemporary witnesses which are recited by modern German actors.

Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.

Eric Friedler, multiple winner of the Grimme and German Television Awards, accompanies the actors from back then on a journey into their past. In intense encounters and interviews, he unearths painful confessions and suppressed feelings of guilt and shows how close fame and misery, rise and fall lie to one another.

Prominent filmmakers talk about documentaries that have moved, impressed, or had a lasting influence on them.

Rex Gildo’s songs and musicals made him very popular. His best-known song was “Fiesta Mexicana” from 1972. Rosa von Praunheim tells the story of his life in the context of the gay pride movement, the normative pressures of the Schlager music industry, and the profound changes currently underway.

A documentary about Jerry Lewis' never-released movie "The Day the Clown Cried".

To mark the 60th birthday of the multi-talented comedian, singer and author Hape Kerkeling, the two documentary filmmakers André Schäfer and Eric Friedler have created a quiet, thoughtful and entertaining portrait of this often anarchic humorist. The film tells of his rapid rise as a teenager, his time and the blows of fate during the AIDS epidemic, the controversial forced outing, his confident exit from the show business and his new beginning. The film is a sensitive insight into the family history and a fast-paced journey through the career stages of a formative figure in German TV entertainment.

Berlin 36 is a 2009 German film telling the fate of Jewish athlete Gretel Bergmann in the 1936 Summer Olympics. She was replaced by the Nazi regime by an athlete later discovered to be a man. The film is based on a true story and was released in Germany on September 10, 2009. Reporters at Der Spiegel challenged the historical basis for many of the events in the film, pointing to arrest records and medical examinations indicating German authorities did not learn Dora Ratjen was male until 1938.

The Stammheim trial against the leadership of the first generation of the RAF was one of the most elaborate in the Federal Republic of Germany. Through this trial, Stammheim also became a place of identity for the RAF. The docudrama uses the perspective of Horst Bubeck, who as a prison officer in the cell wing had the most intensive contact with the prisoners, to shed new light on the history.

Germany's most popular punk rock band "Die Toten Hosen" ("The dead pants") celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2012. In his film "Nichts als die Wahrheit - 30 Jahre Die Toten Hosen" ("Nothing but the truth - 30 years Die Toten Hosen"), established documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler succeeds at presenting an interior view of a band that evolved from an enfant terrible to a pop culture icon and whose work mirrors German history. Friedler takes the audience on a two-hour long roller coaster ride about success and failures.

In "What Remains: Die Toten Hosen – The Last Album", director Eric Friedler exclusively follows the iconic rock band over the course of two years as they create their final studio album. Never before has the band allowed themselves to be observed so intimately in the studio. The film crew also goes behind the scenes of a European tour that the band scheduled in between their studio sessions. The result is a moving tribute to a band that has written German music history and continues to inspire generations to this day.

Documentary about German comedian Loriot alias Vicco von Bülow, who would have been 100 years old in 2023.

The name of car manufacturer Carl F. W. Borgward is still synonymous with the West German Wirtschaftswunder. For hundreds of thousands the "Isabella" from Borgward is the first car after the war while Borgward secures thousands of jobs in Bremen. But in 1961, the company of the passionate constructor goes surprisingly broke.

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A documentary about the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records and its German founders Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff. As jews they had to flee Germany and the Hitler regime in the late 1930s. In New York they wrote music history with their record label Blue Note Records.