Erika Rabau Movies

Samson Vicent's documentary Erika Rabau: Puck of Berlin zeroes in on one of the fixtures of the annual Berlin Film Festival. For over three decades - beginning in the 1970s - photographer Rabau has snapped glossies of actors, actresses and film personnel at the Berlinale. Day in and day out, hers are the eyes through which the world views the festival and its denizens. Vicent follows Rabau over the course of the 2007 festival, which provides a window into the behind-the-scenes goings-on and etches out a telling and enduring biographical portrait of this gifted photographer. The film views Erika's impromptu preparations for the festival, her interactions with such celebrities as Jamie Bell and Antonio Banderas, and the sheer relentless exhaustion of her labor, as she imparts the audience with anecdotes about her childhood in Argentina (and her early dreams of acting), her mingling with celebrities over the years, and her small roles in films by such luminaries as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders. Through it all, Rabau also reflects candidly and pointedly on the nature of her craft and what she seeks to contribute through her career as a celebrity photographer. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi

In this film, the latest of a long string of unusual features by independent producer Lothar Lambert, Tarek (Baduri, a fairly uptight young Arab man, moves into an apartment building in Berlin where everybody in it keeps track of everyone else's business. It's a good thing they're so broad-minded, or there'd be hell to pay. Frau Korkmaz (Nilgun Taifun), a helpful female neighbor who looks a lot like an older Marilyn Monroe, gives him some supplies for his new apartment, and helpfully offers herself as a sexual playmate. While not exactly spurning this offer, he is much more interested in her daughter Susanne (Susanne Gauthier). However, she refuses to be left out of the sexual equation. When the rather conventional fellow objects, she retorts: "Don't think in categories." One highlight of this odd romance is its use of songs by Leonard Cohen. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Sexual preferences simmer and bubble to the fore in this low-budgeter about a TV producer and director who is troubled enough about going over the hill to quit her job for awhile. After she meets an intriguing woman working in a local theater, she feels an unexpected attraction to her. Before long, she has dumped her boyfriend, and the two women head off on a vacation where they meet a crazy transvestite (Lothar Lambert).
~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In this latest of a long string of underground films, Lothar Lambert has chosen to parody himself and the underground film industry, flying Ulrike S. to New York and Toronto for sequences in which she talks to the well-established movie director Norman Jewison (Moonstruck, Agnes of God) about mainstream work and to other underground filmmakers about their projects. Finally, Ulrike decides to chuck the whole business and go back to what she was doing in the first place -- working at a drug store. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

In an unserious look at life on the fringe, this Berlin Underground film by director and writer Dagmar Beiersdorf portrays the flip side of Berlin society: hookers, a transvestite, a down-and-out political exile, and disenfranchised ethnic workers. As dialogue basically happens according to the whim of the moment, the film moves from one spontaneous sequence to the next, roughly following the "story" of a prostitute who takes an Arab refugee into her life, and although the man appreciates her help, his view of hookers is negative. The clash in their perspectives naturally creates some misunderstandings that in turn lead to a different ending than had been anticipated. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Lothar Lambert wrote, directed, produced, photographed, and edited this avant-garde film in the primitive "naive" genre, which stars, along with other local Belin talent, Beate Meitner as Ulrike "S." Bern Lubowski is Ulrike's ex-husband, a man who abuses her until she finally leaves him, and Christoph Wellemeyer plays her younger son whose mission in life is to torment his mother. In addition to mistreatment at the hands of men who are the closest to her, Ulrike suffers through three operations on one eye, and a temporary boyfriend who is a crashing bore. This combination of intolerables puts her on the edge of a nervous breakdown, yet when she seeks help from psychiatrists and doctors they also fail her, needing help themselves. Ulrike has sexual desires that are detailed in nude scenes, but she is the nightmare lady of the film's title, with real nightmares at night and the makings of nightmares during the day. All these elements combine in the end, to bring her story to its emotive conclusion. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Wim Wenders's sprawling cyberpunk noir epic -- shot in no less than nine different countries -- is set in 1999 and stars Solveig Dommartin as Claire, a young Frenchwoman who comes into contact with a large sum of money stolen during a bank heist; in her travels she picks up a mysterious American hitchhiker (William Hurt), who himself steals some of the money before parting from her company. Upon discovering the theft, Claire sets out on his trail, with both a Hammett-styled German private eye (Rudiger Vogler) as well as her former lover, a novelist portrayed by Sam Neill, in tow. The hitchhiker is really Sam Farber, the son of an underground scientist (Max Von Sydow), and his mission is to travel the globe in order to acquire the funding necessary to develop the technology which will allow his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" visual recordings of her family members; the second half of the film takes place largely in the Farbers' compound in the Australian Outback, where Sam, Claire and the others take refuge while attempting to bring the sight project to its fruition, in the meantime pondering earth's future in the wake of a nuclear disaster in outer space. Wenders' most ambitious film, budgeted at $23 million, Until the End Of the World ran into serious issues given its whopping length. The original cut ran 20 hours. Realizing that this would make theatrical screenings impossible, Wenders heavily edited the picture and wound up with a 5-hour cut with which he is reportedly satisfied (known as the 'Director's Cut'). Warners wouldn't go for this either, however, and whittled it down to 2 1/2. That version - which premiered theatrically in the U.S. on Christmas Day 1991- makes little sense ,with a disjointed narrative that doesn't shift gears so much as grind them as the action moves from country to country. Unsurprisingly, it confounded critics and lay viewers and infuriated its director, who all but disowned it. (Echoes of Once Upon a Time in America!) As with the Leone film, though, the Director's Cut of World did evetually see the light of day. It's now widely available in a multi-disc collector's set throughout Europe, and the public response to that version has been far more favorable. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi