It is the time before the First World War - in a fishing village on the Baltic Sea coast, the unusual love story of the young, ambitious lawyer Belling and the fun-loving actress Franziska begins. The young couple believes in career in the neighboring big city, would not be there the rich businessman of Elchem, who limits their love power of his money. Franziska has found an admirer and patron in the entrepreneur - a woman between two men who plays, but cleverly he makes the couple financially dependent on himself... The film adaptation of the novelle by Heinrich Mann describes the moral decay of a social layer fixed on success and money at the beginning of the 20th century.

A two-part East German documentary tracing Russia’s transformation from the Tsarist Empire to the Soviet Union, from the 1917 October Revolution to the achievements of the space program. Directed by Andrew Thorndike and Annelie Thorndike, the film assembles extensive archival footage to chart political upheaval, ideological consolidation, and technological ambition in twentieth-century Russia. Produced by DEFA and first broadcast on East German television in 1963.

During the Second World War, an old fortress is transformed into a detention camp for arrested allied generals who the Germans provide with every possible comfort. In the nearby garrison camp, however, hundreds of captured private soldiers try to survive hunger and cold.

In the fall of 1945, nineteen year-old Mark Niebuhr, is accused of murder and is jailed as a prisoner of war in Warsaw, Poland. He maintains his claim of innocence throughout long periods of solitary confinement. When Mark is placed among a group of Polish criminals, he becomes the target of their aggression. Later, Mark experiences true hell in a communal cell with fanatical German war criminals. Turning Point is based on actual events from Hermann Kant's novel of the same name.

The clever but poor farmer Klaus infuriates the rich big Klaus with his mischief. But little Klaus always manages to get out of the most difficult situations and emerge victorious in the end. But one day, big Klaus has a fit and wants to drown little Klaus. Now he once again has to rely on his intuition and his wit ...

Telling the prisoners of a death camp. Boxer Tony Majer, who got into a concentration camp for a fight with the Gestapo, remembers the murderous work in quarries, on the cruel torture of the Nazis and prison solidarity that helped him survive.

In a small village in West Prussia in the 1870s, Germans, Poles, Gypsies and Jews live together as neighbors. One night Johann, a German mill-owner, secretly opens the dam gates and floods the mill of his Jewish rival Levin. After his business is ruined and his calls for justice go unanswered, Levin leaves town.

The plot revolves around three men waiting to be deported in a prison. To escape the monotony, they form chess pieces from their bread rations, with which they then play against each other. Grünstein, a Polish Jew, proves to be a real talent, because although he is a beginner, he manages to defeat even the experienced player Lodeck, a German sailor, with his "Grünstein Variant".

Berlin, 1948: Paralyzed and robbed of her memory, Fleur regains consciousness after a serious fall. The doctor treating her recognizes that her problem is of a psychological nature and encourages her to face up to her past. The daughter of a brothel owner is reluctant to look back: on a hapless childhood, her relationships with bon vivant Dr. Goldner and the politically committed locksmith Philipp (Hilmar Thate) as well as the difficult period of fascism... This exciting journey into the German past is based on Dinah Nelken's novel "Das angstvolle Heldenleben einer gewissen Fleur Lafontaine".

Kathe Kollwitz was 47 years old, and already a well established artist in Germany and abroad when Peter, her youngest son, volunteered to join the German army in WWI and was killed two weeks later. This painful tragedy changed Kollwitz's life and art forever.