The Tower (2012)
Director
Christian Schwochow
Main cast
Jan Josef Liefers; Claudia Michelsen; Nadja Uhl; Sebastian Urzendowsky; Götz Schubert
Genres
Drama
Description
Adapted from an award-winning best-selling book by Uwe Tellkamp, 'The Tower' depicts a higher class familyâs struggles during crumbling communist rule in 1980âs East Germany. It illustrates the weaknesses and pending downfall of the German communist state through an intimate portrayal of one family's struggles, dreams and decisions. Run-ins with East Germanyâs Secret Police reveal the cracks in both the police state and family loyalties.
Christian Schwochow
Main cast
Jan Josef Liefers; Claudia Michelsen; Nadja Uhl; Sebastian Urzendowsky; Götz Schubert
Genres
Drama
Description
Adapted from an award-winning best-selling book by Uwe Tellkamp, 'The Tower' depicts a higher class familyâs struggles during crumbling communist rule in 1980âs East Germany. It illustrates the weaknesses and pending downfall of the German communist state through an intimate portrayal of one family's struggles, dreams and decisions. Run-ins with East Germanyâs Secret Police reveal the cracks in both the police state and family loyalties.
Similar movies
Story about a forty-something Sarajevo taxi driver named Fudo (Sasa Petrovic) who decides to take control of his own destiny. Fudo doesn't earn much, so he supplements his income by offering tips to the local criminal syndicate and turning a blind eye to their nefarious dealings. One day, after offering a particularly bad bit of advice to a violent gangster, Fudo is badly beaten. When Fudo's wife Azra (Daria Lorenco) discovers what has happened, she decides to take the couple's infant son and move out. Now determined to win his wife back and restore peace in the home, Fudo decides to go straight. But cleaning up his act isn't going to be easy, because after borrowing enough cash from black market dealer Sejo (Emir HadzihafizbegoviÄ) to purchase a van and then refusing to aid him in any underhanded dealings, the only person willing to cut him any slack is the sympathetic Azra.
An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.
A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.
Flanders, a famous female author, travels 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall into the German capitol. She is deeply depressed of the events because she saw the communistic states as a very good thing that has now ended. In the joy of these days she finds no person to understand her, so she has to travel back to Munich. After meeting several people, known and unknown, it seems as if there will be no way to go.
Heimat 3 is the third cycle of Edgar Reitz's monumental Heimat series, which premiered at the 2004 Venice Film Festival. The third Heimat completes the trilogy and brings together particularly the settings of Heimat 1. It follows the new generation of the Simon family, in a period spanning from 1989 to 2000. Germany changed dramatically in this period, and Reitz cleverly reflects the historical events through the charactersâ lives.
A British flight officer plans to rescue an airline stewardess who is trapped in East Germany.
At a Dresden hospital in 1945, nurse Anna Mauth (Felicitas Woll) cares for badly injured British pilot Robert Newman (John Light), whom Anna believes to be a German deserter. As Allied forces close in, Anna grows close to Robert despite her engagement to Dr. Alexander Wenninger (Benjamin Sadler). The gripping historical romance won a 2006 German Television Award.
Europe 1990, the Berlin wall has just crumbled: Katrine, raised in East Germany, but now living in Norway for the last 20 years, is a âwar childâ; the result of a love relationship between a Norwegian woman and a German occupation soldier during World War II. She enjoys a happy family life with her mother, her husband, daughter and granddaughter. But when a lawyer asks her and her mother to witness in a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of the war children, she resists. Gradually, a web of concealments and secrets is unveiled, until Katrine is finally stripped of everything, and her loved ones are forced to take a stand: What carries more weight, the life they have lived together, or the lie it is based on?
We are in the year 1871. A journalist for Versailles Television broadcasts a soothing and official view of events while a Commune television is set up to provide the perspectives of the Paris rebels. On a stage-like set, more than 200 actors interpret characters of the Commune, especially the Popincourt neighbourhood in the XIth arrondissement. They voice their own thoughts and feelings concerning the social and political reforms. The scenes consist mainly of long camera takes.
On Christmas Eve at Tower Sky, an ultra-luxurious building complex, a White Christmas party is held to dazzle its equally high-end tenants and VIP guests. Dae-ho, the manager of the building and single father, is forced to cancel plans with his daughter Hana to work the event. His Christmas is saved when Yoon-hee, the food mall manager with a secret crush on Dae-ho, offers to babysit Hana during the party. Meanwhile, Young-ki the legendary fire chief of Yoido Station has finally promised his first holiday date night to his long suffering wife. The party is in full swing with the spectacular sight of two helicopters flying overhead just to spray snow on the partygoers and make everything perfect. When unthinkable disaster strikes, Dae-ho and Young-ki must summon all their strength and courage to save the lives of thousands but at what cost to themselves and their loved ones?
"Listen: Billie Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." Slaughterhouse-Five is an award-winning 1972 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel of the same name. Director Hill faithfully renders for the screen Vonnegut's obsessive story of Pilgrim, who survives the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, then lives simultaneously in his past, present, and future.
Maya is the perfect mother. Her life revolves around her three childerens, Aleya ( Aachal Munjal ), Ankush ( Nominath Ginsberg ), and Anjali ( Diya Sonecha ). Who thinks nothing much then the world of her. Despite being divorced from her husband, Aman ( Arjun Rampal ). Maya has ensured that everything runs smoothly in her house, under her watch, and that they continue to remain a happy family unit. However, when Aman introduces his girlfriend, Shreya ( Kareena Kapoor ) a career oriented woman, who has a lot to learn about children's, to the family, the situation immediately takes an unexpected turn. When an incident changes their lives drastically, bringing the two women under the same roof, they find themselves putting to test an unusual situation; can two mothers make a home?
Fantastic improbabilities, happenstance and the undying bridge of love are part of this romantic fantasy about an Inuit who crosses years, oceans and the ravages of WWII to find his childhood love, a Metis girl, but finds that their cultures are the most difficult spaces to gap.
The siblings of the Fitzgerald family must decide if the dad who abandoned them 20 years ago can come home for Christmas. Can the big Irish clan get past their grievances to be a family again?
From the John le Carre novel about a British spy who sends a Polish defector to East Germany to verify missile sites.
Two men want to escape from East Germany (under Communist rule) but they will only go if they can take their families with them. Based on a true story.
In this dark tale of revenge, Bruce Lee "returns" as Billy Lo, whose best friend Chin Ku dies of a sudden illness. But suspicion of foul play arises when a gang tries to steal Ku's coffin at the funeral using a helicopter. When Lo's younger brother Lo hears about the incident, he leaves his Buddhist master to investigate the truth. His trail soon leads him to the Castle of Death, the last place Chin Ku was seen alive. There, he meets and befriends an unlikely ally--a cruel and merciless martial arts expert who is also the tower's master. But when the master dies under mysterious circumstances, Lo ends up dueling with someone far more terrifying.
During a house concert, the Bach family gets a visit by their son Wilhelm Friedemann, who has just given up his position in Dresden because he no longer could endure the reprisals of his superiors.
Eva lives in the sinister Tower with her father, a mad inventor, and her grandfather. The aviator Wilfred Durian and his lovely wife live nearby in the town. But Durian's famous flight across the Australian desert was not all it seems... and when his 'dead' partner Arved Holl is rescued by Eva and comes to claim his former fiancée's hand, the whole house of cards is about to come tumbling down. Meanwhile, Eva's own family history is not quite as she had always believed...
Farinelli is a 1994 biopic film about the life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singers of all time.
End of the 1970s in East Germany: Fred and Jonas are close friends. The 10-year-olds live near at the German-German frontier. After the mother from Jonas has made an exit application, the boys have to recognize that they are soon separated from each other. But they want to dig a tunnel to Australia to meet there themselves again. When Jonas should leave the country with his mother this night changes everything.
Elisabeth leaves her abusive and drunken husband Rolf, and goes to live with her brother, Göran. The year is 1975 and Göran lives in a commune called Together. Living in this leftist commune Elisabeth learns that the world can be viewed from different perspectives.
Canadian scientist Dr Geoff Burton takes up a position at a new institute in wintry Dresden, Germany. His contribution to their most important project - a human regeneration gene-has the potential to make something miraculous out of a personal tragedy that has haunted him for years. Errors of the Human Body is about one man´s quest for redemption from his own disturbing past, set within the mysterious world of genetic engineering.
An English family relocates to sunny Greece in the months before WWII.
The film portrays a fictional nuclear war between NATO forces and the Warsaw Pact that rapidly escalates into a full scale exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union, focusing on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, as well as several family farms situated next to nearby nuclear missile silos.
Professor Moriarity has a scheme for stealing the crown jewels from the Tower of London. To get Holmes involved, he persuades a gaucho flute player to murder a girl.
Slovak musicologist Agata Schindlerová, now settled in Dresden, has spent years mapping out the forgotten destinies of Jewish musicians whose lives were irrevocably marked by the advance of nazism. Scenes from the lives of several of them are portrayed in the film In Silence (ballet dancer Alice Flachová, pianist and conductor Karol Ebert, composer, conductor and director of the Dresden Theatre Arthur Chitz, pianist Edith Kraus, and the vocal ensemble Comedian Harmonists), which draws a sharp contrast between the protagonistsâ carefree existence working and making music during the pre-war era and the subsequent severe upheaval in their lives brought on by the proliferation of nazism.
The story spans the years from 1945 to 1955 and chronicles the fictional Italian-American Corleone crime family. When organized crime family patriarch Vito Corleone barely survives an attempt on his life, his youngest son, Michael, steps in to take care of the would-be killers, launching a campaign of bloody revenge.
When a gunman killed five Amish children and injured five others in a Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania schoolhouse shooting in October of 2006, the world media attention rapidly turned from the tragic events to the extraordinary forgiveness demonstrated by the Amish community.
After his beloved daughter leaves for the city to pay off his debt, an old farmer goes mad when her letters become less frequent and it is suspected she may be using her body to get the money.
The "Memphis Belle" is a World War II bomber, piloted by a young crew on dangerous bombing raids into Europe. The crew only have to make one more bombing raid before they have finished their duty and can go home. In the briefing before their last flight, the crew discover that the target for the day is Dresden, a heavily-defended city that invariably causes many Allied casualties
A Danish film produced in the Dogma style by Thomas Vinterberg that portrays a family having a party for their father when one son makes a toast speech that tells the truth about the murder of their eldest sister possibly involving the father.
The supremely world-weary Lemmy Caution, last seen in Godard's "Alphaville" (France/1965), has several strange encounters while trying to make his way from the former East Germany to "the west."
Apathy, technology, paranoia, disease and medication. Meet Arin. Arin is a shy videographer who finds it too much to handle to go out and meet girls, so he sets up an account on meester.net. The flood of responses never comes, save for one email from Susan, a struggling artist who finds her job as a waitress stifling her creativity. Susan is also on the shy side and is seeking an alternative to the classic dating situation. When Arin and Susan finally meet, that alternative dating situation comes to life as the two refuse to communicate verbally with each other, wanting to avoid bs small talk.
Earl Pilcher Jr., runs an equipment rental outfit in Arkansas, lives with his wife and kids and parents, and rarely takes off his gimme cap. His mother dies, leaving a letter explaining he's not her natural son, but the son of a Black woman who died in childbirth; plus, he has a half brother Ray, in Chicago, she wants him to visit. Earl makes the trip, initially receiving a cold welcome from Ray and Ray's son, Virgil. His birth mother's sister, Aunt T., an aged and blind matriarch, takes Earl in tow and insists that the family open up to him.
In this acclaimed drama inspired by true events, Olympic swimmer Harry Melchior (Heino Ferch) defects from East Germany in the 1960s and hatches a daring plot to help his sister (Alexandra Maria Lara) and others flee East Berlin through a 145-yard underground tunnel. With the help of an engineer (Sebastian Koch), Melchior leads the risky plan, under constant threat of being discovered by the authorities.
On September, 11th 2001, after the terrorist attack to the World Trade Center, the building collapses over the rescue team from the Port Authority Police Department. Will Jimeno and his sergeant John McLoughlin are found alive trapped under the wreckage while the rescue teams fight to save them.
Music & Musicals, Opera & Operetta, Classical Music - Witness the Zurich Opera's stunning production of Richard Wagner's masterpiece "Tannhauser," conducted by Franz Welser-Most and featuring Peter Sieffert (Tannhauser), Solveig Kringelborn (Elisabeth) and Thomas Hampson (von Eschenbach). Initially produced in Dresden in 1845, "Tannhauser" instilled a sense of wonder in a few of Strauss's ardent friends and admirers, among them Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. Opera buffs will love it.
In Paris, a young American who works as a Michael Jackson lookalike meets Marilyn Monroe, who invites him to her commune in Scotland, where she lives with Charlie Chaplin and her daughter, Shirley Temple.
A huge panorama of Wagner's life and work, from before the 1848 Revolution, through his exile in Switzerland, his rescue by the besotted King Ludwig II of Bavaria to the final triumph at Bayreuth.
An uptight, conservative, businesswoman accompanies her boyfriend to his eccentric and outgoing family's annual Christmas celebration and finds that she's a fish out of water in their free-spirited way of life.
East Germany. Summer, late 70's. Three years after her boyfriend Wassilij's apparent death, Nelly Senff decides to escape from behind the Berlin wall with her son Alexej, leaving her traumatic memories and past behind. Pretending to marry a West German, she crosses the border to start a new life in the West. But soon her past starts to haunt her as the Allied Secret Service begin to question Wassilij's mysterious disappearance. Is he still alive? Was he a spy? Plagued by her past and fraught with paranoia, Nelly is forced to choose between discovering the truth about her former lover and her hopes for a better tomorrow.
The story about one man - an artist and an intellectual - who was imprisoned by two brutal regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. 'The Professor' is a man who lives by his own personal version of the Ten Commandments. After miraculously surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a bit of ironic fate, he writes a memoir of his life, which becomes the target of the Soviet censors. The so-called "freedom" of Communism becomes just as oppressive as the German concentration camp.
A tragic love story set in East Berlin with the backdrop of an undercover Stasi controlled culture. Stasi captain Wieler is ordered to follow author Dreyman and plunges deeper and deeper into his life until he reaches the threshold of doubting the system.
Ingo Hasselbach, whose parents were Communist Party members in East Germany during his childhood, has lived at both ends of the political seesaw. The question of how people reach a change of heart is a profound one; Hasselbach describes the external forces that led to his founding Germany's first neo-Nazi political party and the internal ones that led him away from it five years later.
After saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, a black male prostitute goes on the run from "the man" with the help of the ghetto community and some disillusioned Hells Angels.
Loving young couple Luna and Amar try their best to overcome unexpected obstacles that threaten their relationship. After Amar's dramatic change in a fundamentalist community, Luna tears herself apart searching if love is truly enough to keep the couple together on the path to a lifetime of happiness...
An alienated teenager, saddened that he has moved away from London, must find a way to deal with a dark family secret.
The Turkish diaspora in Germany proves the catalyst for this noir-flavored drama concerning the unlikely friendship between a veteran of the Afghan-Soviet war and a middle-aged Turk in need of a helping hand.
Miss World Virginity, who is nearly mute, endures a horrifically kinky honeymoon but soon escapes to a scatalogically inclined commune in Vienna. Meanwhile, a madwoman pilots a candy-stuffed boat down a river. Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavajev intercuts these two wild tales with shocking footage of the discovery of mass graves from the Katyn Massacre.
This latest feature from the eccentrically experimental Catalan director Portabella is a beautiful, sometimes faintly bonkers celebration and contemplation of the role Bachâs music plays in the world today. Blending historical reconstruction with very loosely linked âdramaticâ scenes and documentary sequences, the film constitutes a playful, painterly sequence of variations on the argument that Johann Sebastian changed the way the world hears thanks to his extraordinary ear for harmony.
Summer, 1980. Barbara, a doctor, has applied for an exit visa from the GDR (East Germany). Now, as punishment, she has been transferred from Berlin to a small hospital out in the country, far from everything. Jörg, her lover from the West, is already planning her escape. Barbara waits, keeping to herself. The new apartment, the neighbors, summertime, the countryside â none of that means anything to her. Working as a pediatric surgeon under her new boss Andre, she is attentive when it comes to the patients, but quite distanced toward her colleagues. Her future, she feels, will begin later. But Andre confuses her. His confidence in her professional abilities, his caring attitude, his smile. Why does he cover for her when she helps the young runaway Sarah? Does he have an assignment to keep track of her? Is he in love? But as the day of her planned escape quickly approaches, Barbara starts to lose control. Over herself, her plans, over love.
The Czech Republic Director Jan Sverák tells in this Oscar winning film the story of the disillusioned Prague man named Cellisten Louka, who after a fictitious marriage with a Russian emigrant must suddenly take responsibility for her son. However itâs not long before the communication barrier is broken between the two new family members.
A mother and wife stricken with memory loss allows a dysfunctional family a second chance at harmony and happiness.
East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.
Lia and Tina are two beautiful girls who meet and realize that they have a lot in common. They are both young, beautiful and pissed off, so they decide to hitchhike their way to Rome to find Nazariota's commune, a place to stay for free and have all the sex they want... or so they think. Things don't go as they have planned though, and soon they become involved in prostitution, the police and an aggressive gang.
Der Baader Meinhof Komplex depicts the political turmoil in the period from 1967 to the bloody "Deutschen Herbst" in 1977. The movie approaches the events based on Stefan Aust's standard work on Die Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF). The story centers on the leadership of the self named anti-fascist resistance to state violence: Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin.
Shirley has important news for her family, but she has five grown children with different lifestyles and finds it difficult to get them and the kids all together. So in steps Madea, the Matriarch General, to put the family's life in perspective with a hilarious twist on financial difficulties, drugs and, most important, family secrets. The next generation has a lot to learn. In her own way, Madea expresses how deliverance won't change you to be someone else, but will allow you to be who you really are.
© Valossa 2015–2024
