Dorothea Moritz Movies

This German sex-farce from acclaimed filmmaker Lothar Lambert, comments upon post-wall Berlin with a series of amusing vignettes. In one scene two staid housewives offer sharp commentary upon the state of famed Kurfurstendamm square. In another, "Tomb Song" a mother and son visit the cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is interred. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This 1989 film is set several years in the future, in 1995. In the story, Jens Lohkamp (Ian Morse), a computer whiz, is trying to use his computer on an old photograph of a woman's long-lost father to see what he would look like in the present and, with the updated image, help her find him. While he is working on it, he realizes it is a picture of the man he saw kidnapping his sister many years before. The missing man becomes aware that his identity is known, and he attempts to deal with the situation. However, this particular computer whiz has access to more than just the current appearance of the killer. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this entertaining and joyfully absurd children's comedy, an ordinary family wins Willfried, a very large white stallion, in a raffle and are then at a loss about what to do with him, since they live in a small apartment in a Berlin housing project. After the ad agency finishes their spectacular photos of the family with Willfried in the courtyard of the building, they leave and the family tethers the horse outside. But it starts to rain, so poor Willfried is brought inside and gets nervous on the stairs. Things go from bad to worse when the family finds out the ad agency will not take the horse back. The family brings him (illegally) by train to the country home of a friend, at least for the summer. But then what do they do? ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Not to be confused with the 1980 Polish film of the same title, this Va Banque is a lively drama about three ordinary and disillusioned citizens who decide to rob an armored car. Helen's (Grazyna Dylong) boutique is not doing so well, Paul's (Achim Reichel) garage is in the same shape, and the ex-lawyer Stefan (Winfried Glatzeder) has had it with making do as a taxi driver. Stefan meets an armored-car driver while playing tennis and soon has all the right info to pull off a heist. Once Helen and Paul throw in their lot with Stefan, the robbery is a done deal. What happens afterwards is not the usual moralistic ending for a cops-and-robbers tale. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This human drama is about a reporter who slowly translates the loud voice of her conscience into a broader awareness of society and her role in it, after she films a massacre in an unnamed Latin American country. Susanne Kruger (Hildegard Kuhlenberg) goes to Latin America on assignment, and once the news crew and camera team have recorded the aftermath of a massacre of mainly women and children, they return to Germany and their TV station, each struggling separately with their own nightmarish memories of what they saw. When Susanne tries to communicate the horror to her husband, her mother, her friends, she finds that no one can begin to comprehend the enormity of those senseless deaths. Her mother asks why she should care about something that happens on the other side of the world. As Susanne goes over the footage with her camera crew, editing and rearranging the visual data, she starts to come to grips with the manipulation of images to fit into a preconceived story, with the differences, however great or small, between simple reality and the newscasters' interpreted version of reality. With this new twist in her attempts to resolve the shock of the massacre, Susanne gains some insight and begins to follow through with positive actions. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

In this entertaining comedy, two couples -- or "about to be" couples -- meet by chance for a carefree weekend in Berlin. Adding to everyone's enjoyment is a tacit agreement to keep their own workaday lives to themselves so as not to spoil the fun of their weekend. Another couple joins the group and the "wild bunch" have a series of escapades that make for a great two days, before they finally do divulge who they are and what they do. Director Dieter Koster and his wife and scriptwriter Hannelore Conradsen had a series of successful films for youth before creating this low-budget, sensitive work on Berlin and a few of its typical citizens. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

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, All Movie Guide

Underground director Lothar Lambert steps up to a slightly more mainstream comedy line in this uneven story about a wacky, middle-class family who go to their Mediterranean coastal home for a yearly summer vacation. The mother (Ulrike S.) is fascinated by an Iranian masseur, and the father becomes interested in a young, mute waiter -- while the teenage son and daughter take their parents' behavior in stride, because they know that sooner or later, everything will return to what passes for normal in their home. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

As Orlando (Magdalena Montezuma) enters the world of "freaks," the movie develops scenes from a mythological netherworld, the Spanish Inquisition, the Middle Ages, and a few other settings to focus on unusual characters with physical or mental oddities. By the time the various vignettes that take place in these separate periods are completed, each with their own points and counterpoints, the "freaks" seem much less odd than their physically normal contemporaries. After Orlando has revealed much about the human condition through glimpses of a P.T. Barnum side-show, Siamese twins, as well as modern sexual morés, her journey with the viewer is completed. The device of Orlando, the time-traveler and liberated bisexual is based on Virginia Woolf's "Orlando: A Biography." The same set of actors play different roles in each of the five chronological segments. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

This is the third children's feature to appear in 1981 from director Dieter Koester with the assistance of his wife, Hannelore Conradsen-Koester, and unlike the other two features, this story was made for television. A group of youngsters in their pre-teen years are thrown together simply by the fact that they live in the same neighborhood in West Berlin, unique in that it is surrounded by the Berlin Wall on three sides. All the kids in the group are from working-class families struggling to keep their heads above water -- and so the art of survival is definitely passed on from parent to child. In spite of the economic hardships they share, one has been able to get a Super-8 film camera and starts to shoot interesting neighborhood scenes, from the local subway station to graffiti on the Wall. This and other activities often get them into trouble, though most of the trouble consists of being chased and not getting caught by people like customs guards, conductors on the subway, and similar authority figures. Their antics stand in high relief against the Wall erected by their elders, a divider that is taken as a part of the landscape like everything else. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

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, All Movie Guide

A friendship between a young nine-year-old girl and an elderly woman interned at a psychiatric hospital forms the pivot around which this entertaining children's film revolves. Strictly for the younger set, the story starts out with little Marie (Julie Tumler) meeting up with Frau Maria (Inge Meysel), who is allowed out of the mental institution for brief periods every day. Frau Maria wears one red stocking on one foot to keep that leg warm while her other stocking is another color. Other than that idiosyncracy, she starts to harbor a belief that someone is trying to poison her. She was first put into the institution by her son-in-law when he took over her fish shop, and she has been unable to eat fish ever since. Eventually, she runs away from her clinic and little Marie brings her home for awhile. Rather than react against this stranger, Marie's parents are struck by the close relationship between their daughter and the older woman, and they begin to think of some way in which they can turn that friendship to good advantage. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

While riding around on a train with no particular destination in mind, unemployed Matthias Berger is given a lead for a job managing an auto garage. He feels duped because the garage is really a chop-shop for stolen cars. Absolved of any ethical qualms, he blithely embezzles money from his employers, failing to take into account their ruthlessness. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide