Films by Country

Germany

Animation for Kids 2006

Art, fun, folly, fairytales, folkstories and more feature in this collection of animation for ages four to seven.

Battle in Heaven

Batalla en el cielo

Carlos Reygadas

Carlos Reygadas’ spectacularly grandiose follow-up to the startling Japón turns the struggle for the soul of its protagonist into an epic art-porn critique on the role of religion in Mexican life.

Beijing Bubbles: Punk and Rock in China's Capital

George Lindt, Susanne Messmer

Filmmakers survey Beijings’s surprising underground punk rock scene in a celebration of gutter trash wannabes, throat-singing rockers and all-girl expletive-ridden riff magnets.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog

Die Höhle des gelben Hundes

Byambasuren Davaa

Director of Oscar-nominated The Story of the Weeping Camel follows up with an enchanting fable woven from the real lives of a nomad family on Mongolia’s grassy plains.

Factotum

Robert Hamer

Norwegian director of Kitchen Stories gives a lovely doleful glow to beat poet Charles Bukowski’s autobiographical account of his early life as a low-life slob. Starring Matt Dillon.

Fateless

Sorstalanság

Lajos Koltai

A 14-year-old boy adjusts to the horrors of life in a Nazi death camp. “The eerie beauty of Lajos Koltai’s child’s-eye view of the Holocaust as it sank its teeth into Hungary in 1944 is profound." — The Times

I for India

Sandhya Suri

A young Indian doctor immigrates to England in 1965, leaving behind his distraught family. Forty years later, his daughter tells their moving story, using period Super-8 footage.

Into Great Silence

Die Große Stille

Philip Gröning

German documentary about Roman Catholic monks who barely utter a word runs to 162 engrossing, entrancing, enlivening minutes. “A masterful object of contemplation.” — Slant Magazine

Longing

Sehnsucht

Valeska Grisebach

The simplest love story on earth, about a man truly in love with two women, becomes a wonderfully lucid mix of vérité and eternity, a radiant little masterpiece set in small hamlet near Berlin.

Requiem

Hans-Christian Schmid

In this true story a deeply religious and troubled young woman believes her epilepsy is a sign of saintly suffering and the Church sanctions exorcism. Electrifying main performance won Best Actress at Berlin.

Saratan

Ernest Abdyshaparov

Documentary portrait of a small Kyrgyz mountain village makes for a comedy as politically acute and socially affectionate as those emanating from the Czech new wave in the late 60s.

The White Masai

Die Weiße Massai

Hermine Huntgeburth

The amazingly true romantic adventure of a Swiss woman who marries a Massai warrior and lives with him in his mud hut in the Kenyan bush.

The Wild Blue Yonder

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog fashions a sci-fi fantasy of paradise lost around actor Brad Dourif, recutting amazing NASA footage and gorgeous submarine imagery. An unclassifiable oddity.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Ken Loach

British social realist Ken Loach picked up the Cannes Palme d’Or for this provocative drama set in County Cork between 1920 and 1922, a dangerous period before the outbreak of civil war in Ireland. “Staggeringly powerful… The Wind That Shakes the Barley had more to say about the world of today than any other film screening in Cannes.” — Scott Foundas, LA Weekly

Workingman's Death

Michael Glawogger

The world’s most horrible, life-endangering jobs are the subject of Austrian Michael Glawogger’s superbly cinematic, confrontingly aestheticised documentary.