Noted by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as one of his top ten favorite films of all time, this masterpiece from Oscar-nominated director Werner Herzog is an unforgettable portrait of madness and power. In the mid-16th century, after annihilating the Incan empire, Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) leads his army of conquistadors over the Andes into the heart of the most savage environment on earth in search of the fabled City of Gold, El Dorado....

A socialist story of "atoms for peace" and compulsory labor in an East German uranium mine under Soviet control. Banned at Soviet insistence, it impresses even today with its political complexity, variety of characters and realistic portrayal of daily work in a forbidden zone of the industrial landscape. Sun seekers was banned in 1958 at the urging of the USSR, in part because it is about Soviet-German relations and the mining of uranium to support...

Two roommates in a private sanatorium in early-1950s East Germany are extremely different from one another. Josef is a communist policeman, while Hubertus is a Lutheran vicar. While Josef reads The Communist manifesto, Hubertus prepares his sermon. Above their beds hang Stalin and Christ. The film offers both suspense and comedy, as the two begrudgingly develop tolerance and respect for one another. Orginally East German officials had not been open...

Filmed as the GDR crumbled, this somber, finely drawn portrait of life in East Berlin depicts a young architect whose life and goals are strangled by communist dogma represented by the older generation. One of the first fiction films to deal with both the GDR and unification period. Daniel feels like a stranger in his own land. His architectural plans for a new development have been rejected for not complying with standardized designs. His colleagues...

Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined-an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne...

Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and interviews, the author provides a first-hand account of life and death on the home front in the Nazi capital of Berlin, including some Berliners' efforts to help the city's remaining Jews.

By the time the DEFA Studio for Animation Film closed in 1992, it had produced more than 800 shorts in a wide variety of styles and techniques. The 16 animation films included in this collection were directed by 8 different animators between 1974 and 1990, and give a taste of animation production in East Germany. Established in 1955, the studio initially produced shorts exclusively for children. During the 1970s and '80s, however, films targeting...

"For readers of The Alice Network and The Lost Girls of Paris, an immersive, heart-pounding debut about a German heiress on the run from British authorities, who discovers dark secrets about her family's past in post-World War II Germany"-- Publisher.

In a loose set of cabaret pieces, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, highly acclaimed East German poets, songwriters and clowns satirize East German life in its final days and the arrival of new times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Da-Da-R is a wordplay on the irreverent Dada art movement of the 1920s and the German acronym for East Germany -- the DDR. The clowns are allowed to leave prison to sing for people outside. As they perform their...