Gernot Duda Movies

Based on a non-fiction bestseller of the same name by Rolf Hochhuth, Eine Liebe In Deutschland is about a tragic and forbidden love affair between Stanislaw, a Polish POW (Piotr Lysak) and Paulina (Hanna Schygulla) a fruit-and-vegetable vendor in a small town in Germany along the border with Switzerland. Their affair would have gone undetected except for the busybody women of the village, and when Stanislaw is picked up by a German stormtrooper (Armin Müller-Stahl) and brought in for a mock trial, he is given a chance to prove his racial purity and so perhaps escape execution. As for Paulina, she is ostracized by the villagers and imprisoned for consorting with someone who was not of the same high Aryan caste as herself. Depressing, yet politically relevant to Poland of the early 1980s, this film by acclaimed director Andrzej Wajda) is an effective and emotional statement on the nature of oppression. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Filmed in Germany with an American production crew, The Bashful Elephant isn't really about the title character. Most of the screen time is taken up with the elephant's trainer (Helumut Schmid), who is in the midst of an unpleasant divorce. Producer/directors Dorrell and Stuart McGowan had just come off several years of TV's Death Valley Days, and were hoping to crack the family-movie market with The Bashful Elephant. Unfortunately, this middling project never got any farther than bottom-of-bill bookings and occasional engagements in church basements. The brothers had better luck with their next project, the Canadian-based TV adventure weekly The Littlest Hobo--which starred a dog rather than a pachyderm. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi