Wolfgang Widerhofer
Production
Known For
No description available.
German Film Award
Annual awarding of the Grimme Awards.
Grimme Award

Matthias is a master of pretense, from cultured boyfriend to perfect son or marital coach. He makes a career of being someone else. The real challenge begins when he has to be himself.
Peacock

Although to the outside world he seems like a perfectly normal insurance broker, Michael secretly keeps a 10-year-old boy locked in a room in his soundproof basement.
Michael

How do people live in snowbound areas? What are the mechanisms for simply moving snow around? How have ski resorts mechanised what ought to be a natural process? A comprehensive study of global warming as it is directly experienced by arctic and alpine communities.
Melt

Marie Theres is a perfectly assimilated German in Vienna. She is a good wife to her husband Alexander, an understanding mother to her teenage daughter and a successful and respected doctor, who cares deeply about her patients. One day her perfect life falls apart: her husband leaves, her daughter rebels, she makes mistakes at the hospital and her friends abandon her. Then she meets Fa, a self-confident Iranian woman. The two fall in love with each other and Marie Theres starts to learn to put her own needs and wants first.
What a Feeling

A champion marathoner leads a double life as a serial bank robber, sprinting between fixes (and away from police cavalcades) as many as three times a day.
The Robber

Mira lives for the sport of ice hockey and leads her team as captain with a strong determination. It's a challenge to reconcile this with her role in the family vineyard: with her mother and her adventurous but increasingly demented grandfather, she runs the farm - with all its responsibilities. The new player Theresa completely unsettles her with her nonchalance and openness. And when Mira's missing brother Paul also turns up and all three get lost in late-night Vienna, Mira discovers the freedom it means to break rules, to reinvent herself - and that you can only love if you let go.
Breaking the Ice

He was one of Germany's leading investment experts with an income of several million Euros per day. Now, he sits on one of the upper floors of an empty bank building in the middle of Frankfurt, overlooking a skyline of glass and steel. And talks. In an extended mix of a monologue and an in-depth interview, which is as frightening as it is fascinating, he shares his inside knowledge from a megalomaniac parallel world where illusions are the market's hardest currency. Marc Bauder's 'Master of the Universe' is based on meticulous research and provides us with geniune insight into the notoriously secretive and self-protective 'universe' of which our nameless protagonist experiences himself a master. Where other films on the financial meltdown have focused on the epic nature of larger-than-life business, Bauder probes the mentality that made it possible in the first place. A tense drama where psychology meets finance - two things that are more closely linked than you would like to believe.
Master of the Universe

After the catastrophe in 1986, a 30-km restricted zone was erected around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and 116,000 persons were evacuated from this area. Pripyat is a portrait of the people who still live and work there, and of those who have moved back. What is life like for these people, a life with the invisible and incomprehensible danger of radioactivity? How do they deal with the aftereffects of an accident which is claimed to be statistically improbable? Four protagonists tell their stories and provide a look at everyday life in “their“ zone.
Pripyat

In the spring of 1902, Viennese working-class daughter Marie König runs away from her beating father and is lured into a high-class brothel by an agent. Instead of the promised self-determined life "with horse-drawn carriage rides and silk dresses", she experiences closed doors, violence and exploitation. Only after years of agony does Marie confide in the journalist Emil Bader, who makes the conditions in the brothel public and takes the owner, Regine Riehl, to court.
Aufstand im Bordell - Frauenhandel um 1900

Facebook, Amazon and Google provide us with around the clock access to the convenient digital world! Surveillance cameras on the streets take care of our security. But who actually collects our fingerprints, iris scans, online shopping preferences, and social media postings? Don't we care about our privacy anymore? In his unique charming and curious way filmmaker Werner Boote travels around the world to explore the "brave new world" of total control. EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL by Werner Boote (Plastic Planet, Population Boom) - an evocative film about the self-evidence of surveillance. In cinemas 25th of December 2015.
Everything Is Under Control

With a sense of humour, this documentary questions the condition of women from the angle of the image and perception of their body, and covers the new taboos and aesthetic diktats concerning their genitals in the era of the sexual revolution and contemporary feminism.
Viva la Vulva

Franz is by far the smallest in the class, has blond ringlets and gets a high-pitched squeaky voice when he gets upset. Luckily, two best friends help: Gabi and Eberhard. When Franz discovers Hank Haberer's "10 rules for a real man" for himself one day, turbulence is inevitable and the friendship of the three gets into trouble.
Tales of Franz

Flight Number 884 is a film about the wishes and desires of Muslim immigrants. Every year thousands of bodies of Turkish immigrants are flown back from Europe to small villages - villages they had left long ago. The film follows the dead body of a Muslim on its last journey from Vienna to a graveyard in Turkey.
Flight Number 884

Robolove is a documentary that explores the interaction between humans and humanoid robots. The filmmaker visits various technology research centers in Japan, Korea, China, USA and Europe as researchers share the challenges of injecting human emotions into these robots.
Robolove

Some things can be seen more clearly at night.. . A film poem about a continent at night, a culture on which the sun’s going down, though it’s hyper alert at the same time, an “Abendland” that, often somewhat self-obsessively, sees itself as the crown of human civilization, while its service economy is undergoing rapid growth in a thoroughly pragmatic way. Nikolaus Geyrhalter takes a look at a paradise with a quite diverse understanding of protection. Night work juxtaposed with oblivious evening digression, birth and death, questions that await answers in the semi-darkness, a Babel of languages, the routine of the daily news, and political negotiation: All this has been captured in images with a wealth of details that make us look at things in a new way. The longer you consider a word, the more distant is its return gaze: ABENDLAND.
Abendland

Taking the demise of a textile factory in Austria’s Waldviertel region as its starting point, with the antiquated manufacturing plant initially shown in full operation, this film poses the question of what work means for people’s self-image and character. After the factory goes bankrupt and closes, the filmmaker accompanies some of its employees as they continue to make their way, questioning them about their daily routines, the circumstances in which they live, about looking for work or the new jobs they find. One woman’s situation is precarious, but that doesn’t prevent her from bringing up her grandchildren. Another woman works here and there, flexible and resourceful. One man blossoms visibly in his newly unemployed state. Bit by bit, different aspects of their private lives and personal misfortunes emerge.
Over the Years

A well-known nightmarish vision of the future: The Earth's population reaches seven billion. Dwindling resources, mountains of toxic waste, hunger and climate change-the results of overpopulation? Who says that the world's overpopulated? And who's one too many? After the box-office success of "Plastic Planet," in POPULATION BOOM curious documentary filmmaker Werner Boote travels the globe and examines a stubborn view of the world that has existed for decades. But he sees a completely different question: Who or what is driving this catastrophic vision?
Population Boom

A working day in Austria, 2004. Nine modern working-class heroes are engaged in their daily struggle of survival, accompanied, motivated and influenced by the country’s most popular radio station.