Countless films have not been preserved in cinematheques and film museums, but in small archives of local authorities, associations and companies as well as in private collections. In our ongoing series Collect Films! we invite collectors to the Zeughauskino to give us an insight into their collections and talk about their passion.

Animated film in early West Germany was slow to develop its own characteristics in the face of the superiority of American producers, especially as many designers had already been active in National Socialist production, resulting in aesthetic continuities. While most of the creative energy flowed into advertising and commissioned films, the attempt to make a feature-length animated film failed due to conceptual and financial problems. Despite this difficult starting position, animated films were made in West Germany that are worth…

The inspiration came from an appeal on New Year's Eve: bread instead of firecrackers. “We want - in a figurative sense - both humor and seriousness, light and shadow for our film work: Firecrackers AND bread.” What documentary filmmaker Wiltrud Baier, who together with Sigrun Köhler forms the unique directing duo Böller und Brot, formulates anecdotally touches on a concern that is rarely found in documentary film. What is meant is the combination of the serious and the funny, of…

Erich Kästner (1899-1974) is one of the most popular German-language authors. His books have been adapted for the stage, produced as radio plays and repeatedly turned into films. In the last ten years alone, three feature films have been made based on his novels. It is not only his children's and young adult stories that have fascinated cinema audiences for generations and motivated directors to create new adaptations. Kästner's works written for adult readers also live on in the cinema,…

“What is Enlightenment?” is the title of a major exhibition that can be visited at the Deutsches Historisches Museum until the beginning of April 2025. It engages philosophy, science, religion and education in a dialog and poses questions about equality, justice and emancipation - topics that captivated people in the Age of Enlightenment and that we are still grappling with today. The retrospective Enlightened! focuses on women of the 18th century who thought, felt and acted enlightened in different ways. What insignia…

The corpus of films from Weimar cinema that are being restored in archives and cinematheques and thus becoming visible again is growing all the time. As testimonies to a breathtaking variety of artistic forms of expression, new themes and role models, these films that have been made accessible again are unique and valuable. With each new restoration, the image of the era gains in plasticity, which is particularly true of the genre cinema of the 1920s, which directors such as…

In our series Collect Films! we invite small archives and collections to the Zeughauskino to give us an insight into their holdings. In November, Stephan Ahrens and Alexander Schultz will be our guests and present the collection of the Institut für Medienwissenschaften at the University of Paderborn, which specialises in 16mm films. In addition to the archive of German experimental and avant-garde films by women and amateur films, there is also an extensive collection of educational films that were shown at non-commercial…

As one of the central representatives of Taiwan New Cinema, Edward Yang is inextricably linked to the aesthetic renewal of Taiwanese cinema that began in the 1980s. His films reflect the specifically Taiwanese experience of exile, authoritarianism and liberalisation as well as the discrepancy between Confucian tradition and Western-oriented modernity. Yang is a filmmaker of the big city and Taipei is the canvas on which he creates his epic, convoluted and often fractured narratives. The formal power and modernity of his…

Only four documentaries Tamara Trampe and Johann Feindt have directed together: Der schwarze Kasten (1992), the psychogram of a former lieutenant colonel of the State Security; Weiße Raben - Alptraum Tschetschenien (2005) about the physical and psychological damage suffered by young Russian soldiers; the "Heimat Berlin" film Wiegenlieder (2010) and Meine Mutter, ein Krieg und ich (2014) about Trampe's own origins and history. Nevertheless, these four works are among the outstanding documentary films of the post-reunification period. They tell of state violence and the loss of an inner…