Volker Schaner

With exclusive behind-the-scenes access into Herzog’s everyday life, rare archive material and in-depth interviews with celebrated collaborators – including Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman, and Robert Pattinson, we are given an exciting glimpse into the work and personal life of the iconic artist.

The amazing story of electronic music: its epic journey from its origins in Europe, at the hands of the great artists of the post-war classical avant-garde, to the great post-industrial cities of the USA, where this genre of genres took over music stores, shady clubs and, eventually, the big stages.

Long-term portrait of the burglar and bank robber Bernhard Kimmel, who became known in the 1960s as "Al Capone of the Palatinate", cracking up to three safes in one night with his gang. Director Peter Fleischmann met Kimmel in 1970, when he had just completed his first, almost ten-year prison sentence. He interviewed him and became friends with him. Kimmel resumed his criminal career until 1982, when he shot a policeman after robbing a savings bank and injured another so badly that the latter was left paraplegic - a tough test for the friendship between the director and the robber turned murderer. Kimmel was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released on parole after 22 years - and Fleischmann completed his portrait.

Lee Scratch Perry's Vision of Paradise is a unique project in many ways. It is the life story of the legendary musician, but it is not a biography, it is a fairytale documentary! The director followed Lee Perry for thirteen years and discovered an unbelievable story, a revelation, told about and with one of the major protagonists of contemporary music, the other half of the story that has never been told. The movie can be seen as a guide for how to change the world with music, with a positive attitude, mindset or, as Lee Perry calls it, vibration.

One of the first US born conductors to receive worldwide fame, Leonard Bernstein is an exceptional composer and certainly not only due to The West Side Story. Instead of concentrating exclusively on his most famous work, Thomas von Steinaecker sets out to paint a complete picture of Bernstein. Thus, the documentary focusses on the American’s less known later works and on three compositions in particular: his Mass, the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the great final opera A Quiet Place. The film paints a vivid picture of the multitalented Bernstein, struggling with his role as composer and conductor, tackling the tension between successes and flops, between the politics of his time and his own liberal humanitarian claim. It looks back on Bernstein’s major achievements, such as his acclaimed conducting of Mahler and his involvement in the Young People’s Concerts, and it shows Bernstein’s work with young aspiring musicians as well as his political commitment.

A major poet of the early twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is as much part of pop culture as the literary canon. The Austrian writer experienced an intensely creative period in the Swiss mountains in 1922, where he struggled to finish his magnum opus, the Duino Elegies.

Documentary about Otfried Preußler.