Port of Desire

Berlin in June of 1940. While Nazi propaganda celebrates the regime’s victory over France, a kitchen-cum-living room in Prenzlauer Berg is filled with grief. Anna and Otto Quangel’s son has been killed at the front. This working class couple had long believed in the ‘Führer’ and followed him willingly, but now they realise that his promises are nothing but lies and deceit. They begin writing postcards as a form of resistance and in a bid to raise awareness: Stop the war machine! Kill Hitler! Putting their lives at risk, they distribute these cards in the entrances of tenement buildings and in stairwells. But the SS and the Gestapo are soon onto them, and even their neighbours pose a threat.

Marie has had a tough childhood ever since her mother Elisa committed suicide. She has spent most of her life in an orphanage and now makes a living as a small time criminal in Paris. Now she wants to unravel her past and find her father whom she blames for her mother's death.

Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.

A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.

Marianne Winckler relocates to the port city of Caen in order to pass herself off as a member of a large community of itinerant workers desperate to make ends meet. She gains employment as a cleaner on a ferry travelling between Ouistreham and Portsmouth, recording the drudgery of the work she and her colleagues are required to do.

Therese, a café owner, mourns the mysterious disappearance of her husband sixteen years earlier. A tramp arrives in the town and she believes him to be her husband. But he is suffering from amnesia and she tries to bring back his memory of earlier times.

A bourgeois couple, modern yet conventional. One night by accident, a young prostitute barges into their lives. Hounded down, beaten up, threatened, she will continue to struggle, with the help of a well off lady, first for her survival-her resurrection-then for her dignity and freedom. Stormy encounters for everyone involved.

94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein tries to rebuild her life after the death of her best friend. As a result, she moves back to New York City after living in Florida for decades.

Nelie escaped a miserable existence by becoming a frontline nurse in 1914. One day, she takes the identity of Rose, a young woman from a good family, who dies in front of her. She presents herself in her place at Madame de Lengwil's house, to become the reader of this wealthy woman.

After five failed attempts to go to the United States, 18-year-old Ramón decides to look for a friend’s aunt in Germany, but never finds her. With no papers or money, and without knowing the language, he barely survives living on the street until he meets Ruth, an old retired nurse who doesn’t speak Spanish. Beyond language barriers and prejudices, they discover that solidarity and humanity make life bearable.

On a beach in Nice, François meets the mysterious Peggy and falls in love with her. Following her to a villa, he meets Marc, a lawyer who has a strange relationship with the girl.

In post-World War II America, a woman, rebuilding her life in the suburbs with her husband, kidnaps her neighbor and seeks vengeance for the heinous war crimes she believes he committed against her.

After two British Secret Intelligence Service agents are murdered at the hands of a cryptic neo-Nazi group known as Phoenix, the suave agent Quiller is sent to Berlin to investigate.

The story of golf icon and legend, Bobby Jones, who retired from competition at the tender age of 28.

A look at the mysterious relationship between Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his teenage bride Effie Gray.

Middle-aged widow Beatrice Hunsdorfer and her daughters Ruth and Matilda are struggling to survive in a society they barely understand. Beatrice dreams of opening an elegant tea room but does not have the wherewithal to achieve her lofty goal. Epileptic Ruth is a rebellious adolescent, while shy but highly intelligent and idealistic Matilda seeks solace in her pets and school projects, including one designed to show how small amounts of radium affect marigolds.

A young man is sent to "La Maca," a prison in the middle of the Ivorian forest ruled by its inmates. As tradition goes with the rising of the red moon, he is designated by the Boss to be the new "Roman" and must tell a story to the other prisoners. Learning what fate awaits him, he begins to narrate the mystical life of the legendary outlaw named "Zama King" and has no choice but to make his story last until dawn.

After the death of her father, 22-year-old Céline inherits most of his estate, but gives it to her stepmother, causing her greedy fiancé to leave her. Following several failed suicide attempts, Céline is hospitalized and comes to the attention of a nurse, Genevieve, who has struggled with depression. Under her personal care, Céline gradually recovers, and the two women grow close.

On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end and she will now have to support herself and her two teenage children. She finds work at a late-night radio show and encounters a troubled teenager named Talulah whom she invites into her home.

Six months before his retirement from the criminal police, inspector Joss finds his colleague Gouvion dead, in a poorly faked suicide attempt. Joss loses his temper, and investigates on his own, which leads him through the bas-fond of Paris...

In order not to end up as a lock keeper in the country like his father, 18-year-old Abel wants to go to the USA to become a stuntman. Girlfriend Merle is supposed to come along, but then finds out that she is pregnant.

14-year-old Uwe lives in a suburban Hamburg housing estate. Besides trouble, the boy has not much to expect from his parents. To get his hands on some money, he prizes open vending machines, and to let out his frustration, he beats up "wogs". Among them is Dschingis, his nemesis. But one day, the rivals make peace. They become friends because they realize that they have the same problems and are driven by the same dreams and hopes.

Hamburg, Germany, summer 1988. A young bank employee embezzles a large amount of money using an ingenious technique and flees to Australia, from where he phones his girlfriend to tell her what he has done so easily; but her reaction is not what he naively expected.

In the center of Hamburg, the discovery of an unexploded bomb from the Second World War not only leads to a far-reaching evacuation, but also to an interpersonal state of emergency.

When Jonas loses his job at a Hamburg startup company, he doesn’t have the heart to tell his girlfriend Katharina, as her nerves are already on the edge with her final law exams coming up. Every morning he leaves their flat and drift aimless through the metropole on endless underground rides. After a chance meeting with his former boss Marc, Jonas starts to observe the young manager. His curiosity gradually turns into obsession, small and bigger everyday lies become a kind of survival strategy for Jonas. While Katharina notices his increasingly odd behavior, Jonas is losing control over events more and more. Flood deals with feelings of powerlessness of the individual facing a growing competitive and performance pressure. The fear of failing in a perceived competition of life kicks off a spiral of wrong decisions, with no apparent way out. Georg Pelzer’s debut was shot basing on a 20-page plot description, dialogues and actions where improvised with the actors on location.

Belgrade, 2022: A photojournalist is threatened by right-wing extremist groups in her Serbian home and flees to Germany with her daughter. But then she also experiences increasing strong threats and attacks in her new home.

Wanda, a dominatrix who runs an S&M gallery on the Hamburg waterfront, must choose between her lesbian lover and an American trainee.

It all starts with a bang. The car breaks through the crash barrier and falls off the bridge. The lights go out. After that, he is not able to see anymore. His optic nerve is severed, from now on the young stage-director Jakob is blind. His life will change and nothing will ever be the same. Jakob cannot handle the idea of never being able to see again and screams at the only woman who is able and willing to help him, Lily. A rehabilitation teacher, she helps the blind deal with the darkness. Lily has been living with it since birth, she too is blind.

Tom Ripley, an American who deals in forged art, is slighted at an auction in Hamburg by picture framer Jonathan Zimmerman. When Ripley is asked by gangster Raoul Minot to kill a rival, he suggests Zimmerman, and the two, exploiting Zimmerman's terminal illness, coerce him into being a hitman.

In Hamburg's red light district Jule and his mob of macks battle Holleck's competing Viennese clan. When a sex worker is murdered both kingpins join forces to hunt the killer and keep the police from cracking down on their business.

A former U-boat commander becomes a pastor to ease the suffering of young Hamburg women in trouble.

The talented young lawyer Corinna Jakobs is given a great opportunity to make her professional breakthrough: she is to represent the well-known Hamburg fishing fleet owner Petersen in court, who is repeatedly denounced in the press as an environmental sinner by an eco-activist. But when the lawyer falls in love with the rough-and-tumble environmentalist, she finds herself in a difficult conflict of conscience.

Two mismatched women are on the run from gangsters and must help one another to survive.

A successful German overseas merchant with a plantation in Haiti is looking for a suitable wife in Hamburg and comes across a barmaid from the Reeperbahn with an illegitimate child. He wants to marry her, but she does not follow him out of nobility. In search of her, he finds her in Mexico as the secretary of his former lover, a writer.

The film tells the story of a German woman's marriage to an Algerian virologist in Hamburg. When the man comes under suspicion of having contact with Islamist terrorist circles, mistrust grows between the previously happy spouses like a creeping poison...

With the intention to break free from the strict familial restrictions, a suicidal young woman sets up a marriage of convenience with a forty-year-old addict, an act that will lead to an outburst of envious love.

Gabriel, Bobby and Costa are old friends from Altona, a multicultural hood in Hamburg. Just out of prison, Gabriel wants to turn his back on crime, but the others continue to operate as petty criminals. Friendships are tested as the trio navigate a dark world of mafia bosses and deals gone wrong.

Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.

The Hamburg friends Walter, Ricco and Floyd take each day as it comes between the estates of tower blocks and fast food restaurants. All three are in their early twenties and are dreaming of another life when Floyd suddenly takes a job on a freighter going to Singapore.

Achim Bornhak's movie focuses on the restless life of Uschi Obermaier, the icon of the 1968 movement in Germany and groupie. At the age of 16, Uschi is bored by her job in a photo lab, but soon becomes the "it girl" of Munich's club scene. When she gets to know Rainer Langhans, they move to Berlin and live in "Kommune 1", the first politically-motivated commune in Germany. While the other occupants claim she isn't political enough, Uschi just wants to have fun, works as fashion model and leads international music stars in temptation.