Grischa Huber Movies
- 2007
Filmmaker Ed Herzog and actress Heike Makatsch (Almost Heaven) reunite for this easygoing comedy drama concerning two unfamiliar sisters attempting to connect during a short holiday in Spain during the off-season. Anne (Makatsch) is a stressed out Berlin music executive who has hit her thirties and recently learned that she is six weeks pregnant with the child of her terminally mellow boyfriend Philipp (Marc Hosemann). Despite the fact that she loves Philipp dearly, the fact remains that he is fairly unreliable and she is the dictionary definition of a workaholic. After making the decision to keep news of the pregnancy to herself, Anne and her eighteen year old sister Marie (Anna Maria Muehe) book an apartment in a seaside resort town in Spain and set out for a brief vacation. The two sisters don't really know one another too well, but what better opportunity to get acquainted than during a relaxing getaway? Despite their most sincere attempts to find some common ground, Anne and Marie gradually find themselves pushed farther apart than ever before when Anne makes a drunken attempt to seduce a vacationing student named Max (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who later warms up to the younger of the two siblings. As the reality of her age and disillusionment sets in, Anne experiences a minor breakdown that leaves her feeling exceptionally vulnerable. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Heike Makatsch, Anna Maria Muehe, (more)
- 1982
Random encounters, random dialogue, and random thinking characterize one man's journey from the south end of Europe to his home, after his wife has left him shell-shocked by exiting from his life and getting on with hers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Rüdiger Vogler, Daphne Moore, (more)
- 1981
- R
In this drama, a young wife leaves her German home to discover the identity of her mysterious late mother who married a Jewish German during WW II. Her mother was French, and soon after she married her aristocratic husband, Hitler came to power, causing the couple to flee to Argentina. Later he abandons the woman. Much of the complex tale is told via flashback, and in learning about her mother's past, the daughter begins to experience an emerging sense of identity and the knowledge of what she must do to avoid the same mistakes her mother made. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ingrid Caven, Grischa Huber, (more)
- 1980
This is director Klaus Michael Grueber's third foray into filming a play he directed, and it is both interesting and provocative. Although Grueber is primarily a stage director, he has a good sense of the possibilities of film. For this production he filmed his actors in the Berlin Olympic Stadium and also used an abandoned hotel along the Berlin Wall, as well as a few sets that reproduced among other things, a military cemetery. The time is 1936 -- at least for awhile -- and Hitler is appropriating the Olympic Games in Berlin for his own political purposes. But Grueber also looks at what happened before and after Hitler in these same spaces, tracing the shadows of Nazism and its enemies in German culture and history. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- 1977
In this drama, the means by which a monopolistic corporation fixes prices to soak the consumer is shown in detail. A conscience-stricken executive, Bernd (Peter Fitz) reveals the company's insider shenanigans to the public, which results in a governmental investigation. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Peter Fitz, Dorothea Moritz, (more)
The Serpent's Egg, or Das Schlangenei is director Ingmar Bergman's second English language production (The Touch was his first). It is, however, his first completely non-Swedish production, made after his voluntary self-exile from Sweden over taxation issues. Set in Berlin in the early 1920s, it explores the fear and despair the city evokes in Manuela and Abel Rosenberg (Liv Ullmann and David Carradine), two Jewish trapeze artists. The suicide of Manuela's husband (Abel's brother), has stranded them in Berlin. Berlin is shown to already possess the sinister elements of cruelty and anti-Semitism which laid the groundwork for the later Nazi takeover. A series of misadventures gets them sent to a medical clinic for treatment. However, the clinic is actually a site for Nazi-type "racial" experiments on humans, which generally either madden or kill the subjects. Das Schlangenei was savaged by the critics for its improbable-seeming story and more particularly, for casting David Carradine (best known for his earlier appearances in the Kung Fu U.S. television series) in a crucial role. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liv Ullmann, David Carradine, (more)
- 1977
After Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) is the playwright and writer who did the most to fuel the Romantic movement in German literature. A troubled and brilliant man, he committed suicide at age 34, and his life was the paradigm for that of a tragic romantic artist. Penthesilea was among his better known works. This biographical film explores the circumstances leading up to and immediately following his suicide. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- 1976
This West German historical fantasy, based on the novel by Felix Pinner, examines what might have happened beginning in 1910 if the Ruhr valley steel mills had continued their normal civilian operations rather than being switched over to produce war materials. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Grischa Huber, Margret Homeyer, (more)
- 1975
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Student rebellions and demonstrations were a potent force in 1968 and helped bring about sweeping government changes in France and Germany during subsequent years. This movie follows a group of young actors for whom 1968 was their heyday, so that everything they have experienced since then has been a letdown. The two leads in a prize-winning play spend the whole night after a performance discussing their lives and what they plan to do. The man intends just to drift along; the woman is filming interviews with "ordinary" women on the street to bolster her women's liberation agenda. A couple offstage as well as on, their commitment to bringing about a new German abortion law is challenged when she becomes pregnant. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
