Movies: Kurt Barthel

After a breakdown, Rita returns to her childhood village in 1961. As she recovers, she remembers the past two years: her love for the chemist Manfred, ten years her senior; how his enthusiasm about his new chemical process turned to bitter disappoint...

After the death of their father, 18-year-old Helene Raupe (“coccoon”) and her younger sister Asta come under the guardianship of the youth welfare office in East Berlin. Helene fails miserably as a fishmonger, fashion assistant and bus conductor, all...

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With ZUG UM ZUG Barthel creates an amusing as well as bitingly macabre image-sound collage about the negative effects of smoking....

Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state p...

North of Neuruppin lies the Ruppiner Schweiz, the smallest “Swiss” area on German soil. Fontane loved the seclusion and enigmatic appeal of this region’s landscape. As an idyllic recreational and holiday region, it attracts countless tourists every y...

East German short film...

'Traumlos?' sheds light on future plans of three teenagers and young adults in a Brandenburg village. Realized shortly before the fall of the Wall, the film also captures the fears and hopes of young people in the last year of the GDR...

Gathering in Thüringen for their annual rehearsal camp, music students from Frankfurt (Oder) and Zielona Gora celebrate the German-Polish friendship. They soon realize, even though music being the universal language, it takes more to really communica...

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Zeitspiele is a playful satire about optimal time management in a company with countless side blows to the socialist planned economy....

On the necessity of safety measures on the workplace....

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