Self-Determined – Perspectives of Women Filmmakers

Four female musicians succeed in escaping from prison. With their rock band, the fugitives become overnight stars. Borrowing from genre cinema and music video aesthetics, ‘Bandits’ brings musical girl power to the screen.

A cinematic ramble through an East Berlin neighbourhood in the weeks before the monetary and economic unification of East and West Germany. A pastiche of everyday scenes and encounters during the “short summer of anarchy” from May 1 until July 1, 1990.

A young single mother quits her burdensome job. When money runs short, she claims her bicycle was stolen and collects an insurance payment. A realistic depiction of the encrustation of East German society.

A man falls in love with his girlfriend’s sister. But his lover is unwilling to let go and fights against his plans to leave her. Angela Schanelec, a member of the Berlin School, depicts the gritty everyday reality of romantic relationships.

While a murderer is killing women in Paris, an office clerk begins an affair with a proud, young prostitute. An erotic mystery-thriller that combines elements of film noir with those of an elegant extravaganza.

Helke Sander’s film is an ironic and clever depiction from a feminist perspective of the everyday life of a working mother. Her essayistic narrative also draws an authentic portrait of a divided Berlin.

The story of two sisters, one who is active in the women’s movement, the other who ends up arrested as a terrorist. A family tragedy set against the background of the Red Army Faction era in Germany, with a decidedly female point of view.

A young historian roams Lyon on the tracks of French women’s rights activist Flora Tristan (1803–1844). She wants to reconstruct a sense memory of Tristan’s life and finds the city to be an historical echo chamber.

A young building site manager maintains her independence despite two suitors. Accused of “distorting the image of the working class”, the film was banned in 1973. Screening of the 2010 digitally restored version.

Frau Dr Mabuse, boss of a media company, creates a glamorous artificial character to boost circulation. This futuristic media satire combines various different arts and styles into a piece of raging world theatre.

The director traces her childhood with the help of the abandoned family home in Germany’s Rhön region. This cinematic tale brings memories of her deceased relative to life.

In four short films, three women and a transgender man from New York talk about their sexuality. The subjects unfiltered testimonials turn their “female misbehaviour” into a demonstration of female self-empowerment.

A documentary about life in a housing project on the margins of West Berlin, inspired by the camp aesthetics of American underground films of the era. In lavish make-up and flamboyant robes, a 16-year-old girl acts out her dreams in front of the camera.

A 15-year-old girl flees her violent father. On the trail of her mother, who left the family years ago, she embarks on an odyssey along the northern German coast. A road movie with a young heroine on the cusp of adulthood.

A black comedy about a scam artist who bilks men with a marriage con, with the help and support of her mother and grandmother. When two defrauded men get wise to their ways, the family tribe uses brutal means to defend itself.

With the help of his fellow builders, a young convicted criminal finds a place back in society, and personal happiness with the love of a student. Shot on location in the tradition of the “Berlin films” made by the East German state studio DEFA.

In remembrance of her French mother, Malou, a Jew who was forced to emigrate from Germany, a young woman in Berlin goes in search of her identity. In conflict with her husband, she fights to determine her own life’s path.

Six women born between 1907 and 1925 look back at “their” century. The montage of their memories produces a tightly-woven oral history, in which constants specific to women and individual experiences have equal prominence.

As they stroll the summery sidewalks of 1967 Munich, two girlfriends talk about society and its expectations. This narrative cinematic essay uses impressionist techniques to explore female ambition and desire – in Cinemascope and Technicolor.

Three girlfriends roam through newly re-unified Berlin, exploring the East and meeting a few men along the way. An ironic, laconic film that is as adventurous as its wonderfully witty protagonists.

The story of a post-war childhood in rural Bavaria, told with idiosyncratic camerawork from a child’s point of view. Made in 1983, this alternative take on the German Heimatfilm, with a star cast, was also a political statement.

A Turkish mother and her daughter talk about their experiences and problems. The mother arrived in Germany as a “guest worker”. Her daughter, now 24, survived an arranged marriage that was hell for her.

Using photos from archives and family albums, the director uses her mother’s life to draw a portrait of the lower middle-class experience in Germany between 1922 and 1975. A collage of sound and music accompanies the narrative.

A couple, both actors, in West Berlin seven years after the upheaval of 1968. She is active in women’s liberation, he still mourns the unrealized utopia of the student movement. A film about the clash between the political and the personal.

The director spent 1984/1985 in an East German prison after applying for an exit visa. In this documentary, she talks to the people involved in her case, including lawyers and Stasi agents, in a painful processing of the past.

Film as a sort of family therapy – an unvarnished chronicle of a divorced mother in West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel neighbourhood. She talks without reserve about why her family is falling apart, while at the same time discussing her own ambitions.

Portrait of a coal business in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district, run by a woman and staffed by rough-hewn men. This sensitive documentary turned into a survey of social contradictions in East Germany, shortly before the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

A layabout living in Munich’s arty district spends his birthday with a well-heeled young woman. May Spils’ enormously successful comedy proffers Werner Enke’s character as an alternative model to the traditional “male archetype”.

Equal pay for equal work! Four female employees at a West Berlin supermarket, who feel heavy pressure both at work and at home, go on strike to demand the same salary that their male colleague gets.

The mayor of the island of Ummanz off Rügen used to be a cook. Director Róza Berger-Fiedler weaves her encounters with her constituency, and discussions about the office with all its responsibilities into a sensitive portrait of a dedicated person.

A modern Aphrodite – how is it possible to be super sexy and successful at the same time? A career woman faces the conflicting demands of her parents, social life, and her husband. The short combines live action and animation with a slapstick tenor.

A modern depiction of working women in East Germany – laborers and managers in a garment factory talk about relationships and family planning, raising children and career qualifications, women’s rights and equality in the socialist (meritocratic) society.

Behind the concrete is the beach. The film travels from the cell block of Hamburg’s remand centre (where the 1968 anti-Springer demonstrators were held) out into the open air. Dore O. contrasts a concrete wall with waves, dunes, and naked bodies.

Housework seen from a radically subjective point of view. The film shows a woman’s hands busy washing the dishes, which include a white porcelain cup in the shape of a woman’s body. It was shot with Margaret Raspé’s famous “camera helmet”.

Sex on the metro! The director has taken footage shot in a completely empty compartment on the London underground and married it to the off-camera reading of a pornographic text that includes detailed masturbation instructions for a female rider.

A tie or lace? After trying on numerous treasures from New York’s second-hand stores, Karola Gramann decides on a traditional dinner jacket with cummerbund and bow tie. We then see her posing and vogueing to Bryan Ferry’s “These Foolish Things”.

From Ingres’ “Reclining Venus” to Gaugin’s Tahitian women – a museum guard presents famous female figures in art who, as if in a Las Vegas revue, step out of their frames and take on exciting new life.

The view from moving trains shows wintery landscapes through windows that sometimes reflect the interior. The montage that drives this technical, experimental short automatically embraces the detour. Shot with two Bolex cameras.

Photographer Gundula Schulze wrote her graduate thesis on “nude photography of women in East Germany”. She wants to show what makes up the “whole woman”. Scenes of women in the professional world have been edited into the film.

Dr Kurt Noll, a doctor in Shanghai in the 1930s, was passionate about shooting home movies. His daughter put together a montage of his footage, ranging from passage on a luxury liner to camels in Egypt, fakirs in India, and his daughter in the garden.

After their mother’s death, three siblings meet up in her apartment – and revert to their childhood family dynamics. They play concentration and enjoy eggnog with their chocolate pudding, making the regression a not entirely unpleasant one …

Is he the dream prince? As each frog climbs out of the fountain, the princess hopes it will be the one, the love of her life. But no sooner has one been flung against the wall than it turns out to be pretty much a washout.

The director, born in Malatya, Turkey, uses surrealistic scenes to trace the odyssey of a young woman between two worlds. She spent her childhood in the Anatolian countryside and now lives in a large city in northern Germany.

Maria Lang’s autobiographical montage of family photos and new film footage is a description of family relationships that are typical of life in post-war, lower middle class Germany – with a domineering father and a mother who ministers to everyone.

In the satellite settlement of Scharnhorst near Dortmund, more than thousand women live alone or with their children. This documentary uses the point of view of a 26-year-old single mother of two to document the commitment of the women’s initiative.

Young people living in a children’s home talk about their unstable home situations and domestic violence. Many of them have alcoholic parents. They speak openly about the past and their hopes for a better life.

Lisa is eight and spending the summer with her parents in the mountains. But her father is often away and her mother is always busy with washing and doing the dishes. Lisa watches and fantasizes about being far away.

Monday morning, 7 am. Three alarm clocks ring. Just in case. Even so, the young man doesn’t wake up until the young woman asks the postman to wallop him one. This is a merry rehearsal for ‘Go for It, Baby’.

Stories from the lesbian subculture in West Berlin, about being in love, clichés, desire, and conflict – “shot as a narrative, with real lesbians at real locations about real feelings”.