When she discovers her students are hiding their true thoughts and feelings, Carla (Jutta Hoffmann), a young and idealistic teacher at the start of her career, goes against the routine opportunism, hypocrisy and small-mindedness all around her.
This two-part epic traces the development of a manor and farm in Mecklenburg, from the flight of its aristocratic landowners before the advancing Soviet troops in 1945, to just after the East German uprising of June 17, 1953, by which time it has become an agricultural cooperative.
Although Dammbeck’s original film project Herakles (Hercules) was rejected by the East German DEFA Studios in 1983-84, the artist was still fascinated by the Hercules story.
In 1830s Cuba, a rich slave owner’s son falls for Cecilia (Daisy Granados), a proud and beautiful mulatto girl. While revolution simmers and then boils on the island, his parents force him to marry a woman of his own class.
The scene is East Germany in 1977, during the infamous Red Army Faction kidnapping of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer in West Germany. A couple of East German teens are caught with contraband photos of West German Baader-Meinhof terrorists.
Ernesto Che Guevara was only 39 years old when he was executed in the Bolivian mountains in 1967. This film tells the story of Che’s short life: his childhood in Argentina, his early interest in the Spanish Civil War, and the motorcycle trip through Latin America that changed his life forever.
An anthology of portraits from one of the longest-running documentary projects in film history, which has followed children who started school in August 1961 for almost five decades (the last part was released in 2007). No DEFA documentary film is as renowned as the personal accounts of
A film about children and teenagers living in an East German children’s home in Mentin, Mecklenburg in the late 1970s.
French colonists and Hurons fight against English troops and their allies, the Delaware. Only Chingachgook, a young Delaware, and his fair-skinned friend Deerslayer realize that the colonizers intend to exterminate the Native Americans altogether.
Set in the late 1950s, a young Cuban couple and their friends struggle with all their might, in the urban underground movement, against the Batista regime. They get into a dangerous crossfire with the secret service and police, and must fight for their lives.