Solness

The ever-popular star architect Solness has reached the top through talent and a healthy dose of egotism. But it’s lonely at the top. And it is dangerous. Because all at once his wonderful world collapses. His children die in a fire. His wife turns away and begins a relationship with the family’s shady friend. His youthful competitor beats him out in an important tender. Now of all times, as if out of nowhere, the very young Scandinavian architecture student Hilde appears. Beautiful as a Botticelli angel, she forces her way into Solness’s life and soon plays up her attraction icily. More and more the angel becomes a monster

of manipulation. A perfidious, erotically overheated conundrum begins, in the course of which reality and delusion become blurred. Only gradually does Solness realize that something connects him to the girl. Ten years ago, in Lysanger, Scandinavia, he had made her a promise and failed to keep it. Has Hilde come to take revenge? To kill him? Solness must accept the fight for life and death. To do so, he must also confront his always-denied fear of heights….

Der Preis

Architect Alexander Beck has won a prize with an ambitious project for the conversion of prefabricated buildings in Thuringia. He travels from Frankfurt am Main to the East German province and behaves like a foreign, outsider designer: blocks of houses are to be torn down or modernized, a residential district is to be given a new look according to his plans. Nothing more. But the longer he is at the real construction site, the more difficult it becomes for him to maintain his usual professional distance. After all, the small town in Thuringia is Alex` hometown, and the apartment blocks are those in which he grew up.

Memories that the architect initially wants to avoid gradually break their way during his stay. They lead back to his youth in the GDR, to the year 1988, to the story of the bitter end of a friendship: Alex and the brother and sister Michael and Nicole have been an inseparable trio since childhood. Shortly before graduation, however, the rather system-compliant FDJ secretary Alex and the provocative, loner athlete Michael suddenly find themselves as irreconcilable opponents. At the same time that Nicole and Alex are tentatively falling in love, the rift between the boys grows painfully deep. Alex, who admires the siblings for their apparent independence, finally makes an effort to talk things out. When he is rejected by Michael, also because of his affection for Nicole, the hurt Alex betrays his friend.

There was and is no opportunity to make up for this debt, because Michael took his own life at the end of his school years. Only in today’s vis-a-vis of the familiar concrete buildings, in conversation with a new colleague, and above all in the re-encounter with Nicole, who still lives in their shared hometown, does Alex find his way back to a long-repressed part of his biography.

Icewind

The Ice Wind tells the story of two mismatched girls growing up on a 1940s Berlin housing estate. They experience the cruelty of the times through their very own eyes. The children live out their fantasy world in a kind of “magic world” that they have set up in their own basement. An important role is played by the red magic cloak, which the children include in their play as a central prop and which ultimately leads to a mix-up. But the story only seems to take a happy turn.

Shortcut to Hollywood

John F. (Friedrich) Salinger – whose real name is Johannes Friedrich Selinger – is an insurance salesman from Berlin by profession. Now 35 years old, he realizes that his life hasn’t actually turned out the way he once hoped – that he won’t leave anything of himself to humanity, that the realization of his dream of fame and immortality is getting close. Then he comes up with a brilliant idea. A film which will help him to eternal fame.

His two friends, an ambulance driver who dropped out of medical school and a failed used car salesman, are thrilled. So the three underdogs set off on their documentary road movie to the USA. They are sure of their cause, because even if it will be hard: Hollywood will soon be at their feet!

Singing, they drive off over the endless highways across America, the most incredible idea in film history in their luggage. At first, they are at best smiled at. But when they get serious, when “the bomb bursts,” everything starts moving: The conquest of the new continent begins, and the media machinery gets going. America is suddenly upside down. The venture works out and the three actually become world famous. But the price is high. For John must die in order to live eternally.

Teleportation

Frederike and Fabian, both 10 years old, secretly plan an experiment. They want to beam away their friend Jonathan, also 10 years old. The experiment goes wrong and instead of the boy, suddenly all the people in the village have disappeared. The school is also completely empty.

While searching for the causes, they discover images on television of people climbing up the Berlin Wall and driving their Trabbis toward the border. The children realize that they have accidentally beamed all the people to West Berlin. They must repeat the experiment to save their parents and neighbors. An adventurous retelling of the events of November 9, 1989.